The iPhone 4S is coming to Japan: both SoftBank Mobile and new provider KDDI au, the No. 3 and 2 mobile carriers in this country, will start accepting pre-orders from Friday October 7, as shown on Apple Japan's website.

The iPhone 4S will then become available exactly one week later, on October 14 (as in the US, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and the UK).

According to Japanese business daily The Nikkei, KDDI will offer the phone in 1,200 locations all over the country, including electronics retailers. The company plans to boost this number to 5,000 as early as at the end of next month.

Just like SoftBank, KDDI will offer the iPhone 4S only in brick-and-mortar stores, not online.

Tags: Cellular Phone, Japan by Serkan Toto
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Some days ago we reported KDDI may distribute the next iteration of the iPhone. Now the reactions are coming: Goldman Sachs predicts hard times may come for Softbank [J], Softbank falls a 5% at Tokyo Stocks Exchange.

Softbank, with a 21% share of the market, is the third leading mobile service provider in Japan, trailing NTT DoCoMo (48%) and KDDI (27%). Although the company won a major advantage by being the country's exclusive iPhone distributor, its relatively poor coverage area and services have come into question lately, leading many to state that if another carrier stepped up to ship the iPhone, they would switch without hesitation.

KDDI, under its new CEO Takashi Tanaka, has recovered some of its lost fighting spirit. They introduced Skype preinstalled in all their phones; and in August they were the first to introduce Windows Phone in Japan. Now, with the iPhone 5, probably a lot of the young people who moved to Softbank will come back to their old provider.

Meanwhile, Masayoshi Son (Softbank CEO) announced in the next 2 years they are planning to invest 2,000 billion yen in order to improve their infrastructures. DoCoMo is pushing hard with their new technology LTE (also known as "Super 3G" or "3.9G") under the Xi brand, which allows smartphone users to enjoy a a bigger volume of data and more speed. For the time being it's only available at the center of Tokyo, Nagano and Osaka. Probably the social games devices (Sony Xperia PLAY, PS Vita and others) will help to the development of this new system.

Sources: Mainichi Shimbun [J], NTT DoCoMo

Tags: Cellular Phone, Japan, Technology by Daniel Alías
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Nikkei Business Online is reporting [J], according to people familiar with the matter, the nation's second carrier KDDI has an arrangement with Apple on selling iPhone in Japan.

In Japan, iPhone has been exclusively provided by the 3rd carrier Softbank Mobile. It is not officially disclosed but Nikkei speculates that Softbank has been selling 7.5 million units. Half of Softbank's new subscribers are said to purchase iPhone, which push them up to the close third position despite its rather weak network.

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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The Telecommunications Carriers Association (TCA) of Japan has released a set of statistics on Japan's mobile market today, showing that the country had 122.44 million cell phone subscribers last month (out of a total population of 128 million). According to the organization, Japan's carriers added 569,200 new customers between July and August.

Breaking down the number to individual carriers, the TCA said that:

• Softbank Mobile gained 239,000 new subscribers on a net basis in August, bringing the total to 26.62 million
• NTT Docomo came in second with 182,100 subscribers gained (total: 58.79 million)
• Emobile gained 75,000 new customers (total: 3.42 million)
• KDDI au attracted 73,000 subscribers (total: 33.53 million)
• Willcom gained 55,100 subscribers (total: 4.1 million)

According to Wikipedia (which uses slightly outdated numbers for some countries), these statistics make Japan the seventh largest mobile market in the world.

Tags: Cellular Phone, Japan, News by Serkan Toto
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According to Sankei Sports [J], DeNA, known by running a big social gaming network Mobage, is one the list of companies who are talking with TBS, a Japanese TV network company who owns Yokohama Bay Stars [J] of Nippon Professional Baseball(Puro Yakyu) [J] Se-League, to purchase the team.

TBS Holdings tried to sell the Bay Stars last year to Lixil group, but the talk collapsed over the issue that TBS requested to keep the team in Yokohama.

Sankei reports backroom deals are in the works with multiple companies including DeNA and H.I.S., a travel agency.

In 12 top teams in 2 Japanese professional baseball leagues, where many owners post their brand over the team (like Hokkaido-Nippon-Ham-Fighters, this case region name + brand + team name), having a team means that the brand name will be called on TV news, reported on newspapers. From IT/software industry, Softbank and Rakuten have teams.

DeNA PR denied the story. Weekly Toyo Keizai points out [J] that DeNA's interest is now on oversea operations than domestic promotion, Bay Stars might be too small as a promotion for this cash-rich company.

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
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