And the answer for most people is ‘I don’t really get that much to make it worth it’. So the niche market will continue, as it has since iPaq, Palm, XDA, days.

Here are some reasons why:

1. No IC CARD SYSTEM:
I currently have SUICA and EDY on my keitai and it’s just super convenient and great. Pay for taxis, trains, convenient stores, bus transportation, gas, and a whole slew of other things!
For me, if IPhone doesn’t have it, it will be hard for me to rationalize the switch.

2. No 1seg TV
My current phone has it. Sure, Iphone has YouTube and other stuff, but it’s nice sometimes just to watch Japanese Television.
For me, this isn’t so important, but it’s a nice thing to have that many Japanese phones have now-a-days, and with the typical long commutes to work in Japan, this is just one of the things to keep you occupied (for the Japanese Salaryman or anyone Japanese for that matter).

3. No Memory Expansion/Removable Media
Current phone has it.
It would be nice to have something like MicroSD cards for the IPhone, at least to provide some more memory expansion, and ease of removale if one so wishes.

4. No Kaomoji (Facemarks for Text Messaging)
Most everyone I know loves to use this in their messages. The ability to do this in mails is extremely popular in Japan. Young people are especially keen on this.
If IPhone doesn’t have a comparible system, this will certainly be a limiting factor.

5. Poor Camera Quality
2.0 mp? Pfft. Many phones now in Japan are around 3.0 or moving rapidly to 5.0 in quality. To me there’s not point in carrying around and using a 2.0mp camera on the IPhone, especially when there are 5.0 models commonly around now. That’s just me, however I think the more and more camera quality inreases in phones, the more and more 2.0 is going to stick out as a weak point.

These are the primary reasons for me. Sure, there are great things about the IPhone, yet for the Japanese Market, I don’t have so much confidence. I’ll go look at the IPhone, though I really doubt I’m going to bite.. I’ll probably wait for a new model and hope Apple becomes more ‘Market Sensative’.

Absolutely agree that there are tons of cool features in Japanese phones that the iPhone 2.0 will not have, and also agree that at the same time superior browsing experience may actually matter more to people than all those nifty bells and whistles.

Regarding Apple partnering with au for the iPhone, that has always been out of the question, simply because the iPhone is a device on the GSM/GPRS/W-CDMA network standard evolution path. Making it run it on au’s network would have required producing a CDMA1x/EV-DO version of it, which would in no way make sense in terms of scale since only less than 15% of the world’s mobile subscribers are on CDMA1x operators.

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=479920

It looks quite nice, although I’m not sure how well taking サカア as input and matching anything from サシスセソザジズゼゾ・カキクケコガギグゲゴ・アイウエオ will work. The list of conversions isn’t even sorted by frequency of use, although it is of course beta.

I’m a DoCoMoPerson now too, and the new models are pricy but you get lower monthly rates over the year or two of your plan if you play along, according to the calculations I’ve seen. I was worried for a bit because DoCoMo announced its first wifi-ready model complete with an additional ¥1,000 per month fee for connecting to NTT services via 802.11 . . . I saw it as a hint of impending iPhone surcharges and a sign of doom. Now the only doom I face is deciding whether to jump ship and pay the MNP fee to get a SoftBank iPhone instead.