The iPhone. The large lines waiting outside "Apple" stores, people craving to get one, the massive publicity, hype, and success of the iPhone. Just a few months ago, a survey suggested that the iPhone would crush the Blackberry. In America, the iPhone is definitely a big hit; however in Japan it is dead.
Still, expectations had been high. I mean, if anyone could break into such an insular market, Apple would with the iPhone 3G because of its strong brand name and popularity of its iPod players and Macintosh computers. The original iPhone wasn't sold in Japan.
However, Just two months after 'the most hyped mobile phone' launched in Japan it has failed. Boxes are left, piled high, in the back rooms and the initial sales prediction has been halved. According to MM Research Institute, Apple sold about 200,000 phones in Japan in the first two months. The demand has been falling steadily since , and analysts now widely believe sales are unlikely to reach a total of 500,000 units. That is half of the one million units that they previously thought Apple could sell.
If Japan took in the widely known ipod, why not the widely known iphone?
One reason is that Japanese users already have access to some of the most advanced mobile-phone technologies in the world. Japanese cell phones typically contain a high-end color display, digital TV-viewing capability, satellite navigation service, music player and digital camera. Many models also include chips that let owners use their phones as debit cards or train passes. The iPhone, however, does not have most of these features.
Another reason is Emoji..
What is Emoji you may ask?
According to Wikipedia, "Emoji is the Japanese name for the picture characters or emoticons used in Japanese wireless messages and webpage’s."
However, to the Japanese people Emoji is much more than that. Almost every Japanese phone has it for expressing happy faces, sad faces, hand gestures, symbols, sports, weather, hobbies, and more. (See Picture)
An American might think that such a trivial feature would appeal only to children, but over a third regularly use them, and two in five sometimes use them, making them seem like only second nature to the majority of Japanese people.
For example, let’s say that you are inviting your friend to a match of chess, when you type 'chess' up comes a little graphic of a white pawn automatically, so why not?
However, if you are an iPhone user you can not send nor receive these Emoji.
Without support for both reading and writing emoji, the iPhone is useless. When the iPhone first launched, a review in Nikkei Trendy Net described it as a foreigner with excellent Japanese, noting that although it can handle technical aspects of Japanese very well it fails to understand the culture.
