3G iPhone, only possible choice for Mac users in Japan
Call me old-fashioned, but my requirements for a cellphone are:
1) phone calls
2) synchronising addresses and events
3) SMS
I couldn't possibly care less about anything else.
Will I be getting a 3G iPhone should it launch here in Japan?
Absolutely yes. Why? Simply because unlike Nokia, Sony-Ericsson et al, Apple would never allow a cellphone company to carry their phone and disable the ability to do address/event synchronisation with Mac OS X.
That's what Japanese cellphone companies have been doing for years. Apple's iSync software supports a large number of phones available in Japan, yet the syncing doesnt work because the operators won't digitally sign the applet that iSync sends to the phone to communicate for the purpose of synchronisation.
Use the same model of phone purchased outside of Japan on a network outside of Japan and the synching via iSync works just fine.
Talking to customer service about this issue has been a waste of time. They simply don't care. And no, its not due to language barriers, I do speak the local lingo well enough to be confused for a native on the phone all the time.
Japanese cellphone companies lock down the phones so totally and completely,
there are may situations where you cannot even view content if it hasn't been signed by your Japanese cellphone service provider. Not that I care about multimedia on a cellphone anyway, but it shows how bad things are over here.
With such a complete lockdown, I will be looking forward to an iPhone cause synching with my Mac is the one thing that is 100% guaranteed to work and it is the one thing that along with phone calls and SMS I do not want to miss.
Not that this is of much interest to anyone in Europe, but perhaps it illustrates how silly it is to assume that everybody is buying a given item for the same reason, and how ridiculous it is to make conclusions based on what one may presume that reason to be.