their phones are usually crammed with way more features than we have.
Japanese phones do have some fancy features that are not present on the west, such as a feature-richer GPS, electronic wallet, higher res cameras, free-to-air digital TV, and others. Phones in the west do have a few not abundant in JP, such as Bluetooth, IMAP/POP mail access, non-DRM music playback.
Most Japanese, though, couldnt care less for ones or the others. Most are afraid of using the electronic wallet, prefer web browsing to watching TV while on the move, watch pictures only on the phones display, and are absolutely ignorant on how to use the GPS. Most change their phones every so often just based on the looks, and on that, the iPhone beats them all.
There are two features they cannot live without, though: e-mail and internet. Those have some Japan-only characteristics, though:
- Graphic smilies (emoji). Calling them just that is misleading, though, since they are not just faces, but also flowers, vehicles, symbols, sports, signs, diacritial marks, etc. They come in the hundreds. They use them a LOT on e-mails, and internet JP sites for phones (which is the main one for many -if not most folks there) is absolutely littered with those.
MobileSafari and MobileMail as of >2.0 do not display those icons, so it essentially breaks most Japanese mobile sites, and people cannot, not only type them in their mails, but neither see the ones they receive from friends. It is yet to be revealed if the update will tackle that, but I am sceptic.
BTW, as of >2.0, MobileSafaris experience on Japanese mobile sites is terrible. Not only are all those icons missing (which are not just ornaments, but usually have a grammatical function), but lines wrap like they would in the desktop, making the characters way too small (as in unreadable). Zoom in, and you have to scroll both vertically and horizontally to read any text. Terrible to use.
There are also text-based smilies (kaomoji), much more rich in meanings and complex than western ones. It is not sensible to type them manually since they use so many weird characters, so all Japanese phones come with a launcher with a list of 100, to enter through a fast menu in any text field. While I doubt they will add something like this to the Jap IME, well, at least iPhone users will still be able to read the ones friends send to them.
- Typing. Due to how Japanese language works, one types waaaaay faster in Japanese than in any language based on latin characters (no matter predictive dicts). Just to give you a reference, of the 10 best selling fiction books of 2007, 7 were originally written for mobile phones ON mobile phones. Apple clearly saw that it is plain stupid to try to enhance a system people find comfortable enough to write a novel with, so they added a numerical keyb layout for Japanese IME (besides, the iPod Touchs Jap QWERTY IME is absolutely terrible and unusable, lets see if they tweak that one too).
If typing ends up feeling awkward (i.e. very different from other phones), it aint going to look pretty.
In my opinion, no other feature matters one bit, Jap will be happy to sacrifice them all for the coolest-looking phone if you leave their internet and e-mail intact. But screw up on reading icons and typing, and the iPhone is doomed in Japan.
Summing up: the iPhone will be a hit in JP on day one, that is for certain. As of now, Japanese just know how cool it looks, but not yet if it clashes with their habits and needs. The real important question, actually, is how of a hit it will be 1 year from now (and how Apples image will have suffered, maybe just like Vodafones did).
PS: Another possibility, of course, now that new apps can be installed on a per-terminal basis, is that SoftBank releases an additional web browser and mail agent just for Japanese mobile content, so it deals at least with the emoji issue. But I honestly doubt it.
