While most of the rest of the developed world has been fawning over the iPhone, in Japan - it's just not that hot.
Japanese Mac ad. Photograph: Peat Bakke/Flickr/Some rights reserved
Wired explains that from tomorrow, Japanese retailer SoftBank this week launched the two-year 'iPhone for everybody' contract which gives the 8GB model away for free - a desperate move to drive take-up after rubbish sales. And the problem? Compared to most Japanese handsets it's really low spec'd.
That's a sharp contrast to the UK and the US. O2 just announced it sold 1m iPhones in the UK overall, with 390,000 in the UK alone. Though Apple has sold more than 10m worldwide, Japan presents a problem market for the firm because of hostility to non-domestic brands. Apple reportedly sold 200,000 devices in Japan in the first two months since launch, but then hit a slump.
More importantly, there's no video function or multimedia messaging, the camera is poor and - with the exception of any about-to-be-launched brand, specific apps - there's no TV tuner, which is standard on many Japanese handsets. Just one competitor is the Panasonic P905i with its 3" TV, 3G, GPS, 5.1 megapixel camera and Wii-style motion sensors for games.
• Update: That Apple is suffering from bad iPhone sales in Japan has been strenuously denied by various sources, as Bobbie explains.
