The Latest News and Rumors from Apple's iPhone in Japan

What are the latest leaks about what the iPhone will be like now that Apple is about to introduce it in Japan? Bringing news together I'm able to begin to see a clearer picture of what the future holds and how my earlier predictions might come true.

Japan is a nation where Apple's iPhone heavily relies on 3G or high-speed data transfer. The notion that 2G stocks are being sold at firesale rates in the UK and are currently being sold out sounds like a fair wager. But no one noticed the Apple product requesting approval because so many eyes were focused on the FCC website and its counterparts in other nations. Because the approval procedure might take up to three months, it seems like consumers won't be able to get their hands on the iPhone Applie in Japan or other countries worldwide until the fall. Since there has been no concrete rumor of a production order for the additional third-party hardware needed to power the iPhone 3G, I believe that a battery age or other issue must be the cause of the delay.

Japanese input. Many developers have received beta versions of the upcoming Apple iPhone v2.0 program, which will likely be unveiled at the Apple June WWDC, and are eager to reveal the specifics of what they have learned. For instance, MacRumors has stated that the software has handwriting recognition for Chinese but not for Japanese. It is anyone's guess whether the absence of Japanese handwriting is caused by licensing difficulties, if they haven't completed a contract, if they aren't able to complete one, or if they are just avoiding it, despite the fact that Japanese kanji and Chinese hanzi are quite similar and that Japan does have a more widely used set of characters.

However, the intriguing news is that the iPhone, one of the prerequisites I previously identified for Apple's iPhone in Japan, now has a soft kana keyboard that works with the numerical keypad standards used by most mobile phones. This means that to enter Apple in Japanese, for example, you press the kana key A once, the TA key six times to cycle through the TA-CHI-TSU-TE-TO-TSU small (or TA three times from the make-kecil key), the HA key three times to get HI-FU, the rendaku key (same as the make-kecil key, according to the screenshot) twice to get BU-PU, and then three RA to get RI-RU. Instead of using the standard QWERTY keyboard to type APPURU and then pressing the conversion button to convert to katakana, you do it this way. The conversion key ultimately allows the final selection of katakana.

The screenshot I saw included the well-known HELLOEWEEN dictionary that every Sony-Ericsson phone has after making the aforementioned statement and singing praises for their foresight! When you input predictions in Japanese using the word HARO, HELLOWEEN is one of the top four possibilities. Indeed, the whole input prediction seems overly eager to propose any word that may have a faint resemblance to what is being typed, regardless of the word's frequency. To be fair, this is still in beta, but that kind of conduct won't make Japanese people love Apple's iPhone.

Therefore, there are hints in a few little news items that there are moves in the eastern direction, but it seems that their gaze is fixed on China. When will Japan see the Apple iPhone?

Ken Yasumoto-Nicolson looked at Japanese surveys and blog polls, covering a wide range of subjects from Apple's iPhone to Japanese emoticons, with the majority of the information being offered for free and translated exclusively.