Honestly, for the IPhone to really take off in the Japanese market, there needs to be a number of changes. I’d be very suprised if Apple took any significant marketshare in Japan with IPhone.
The concept is great, but compared to other already existing convenient functionalities in Japanese phones, I don’t see many people biting until more Japanese services can be integrated, i.e. Suica/Edy IC Card, Kaomoji, real Japanese keitai email. Fast, intuitive Japanese Interface, etc etc.

1) Battery life stinks. Apples solution is to turn off 3G. If you do that in Japan you have no signal at all, so its not a solution.
2)Japanese input is painfully slow in 2.0 firmware. I think it is so slow that people may demand their money back for the iPhone. It borders on unusable. It even causes music to stall on occasion during a lookup. I know a reboot brings the phone back up to speed but it quickly degrades. I have just downloaded 2.0.1 which people suspect is supposed to fix the sluggishness but as far as I can tell it didn’t do much, if anything, for the Japanese input. This is not a “getting used to the input method” problem. It would be the fastest Japanese input I have ever seen if it were not bugged.
3) Also the Japanese predictor can not predict very well. Typing a simple sentence before selecting what I wanted from the predictor on my old phone would produce what i wanted. Stringing two or more words together before selection on the iPhone leaves you with only a katakana and a hiragana option.
4) As BlogD said, the softbank email account you are given is not push so that means you are looking at a 15 minute wait to get mail from your friends. I also agree with the rest of what he said about not being able to change the sound.
5) All email from the iPhone is 100% included in your monthly costs. That means you can send thousands of emails to your DoCoMo and au buddies however, it is not a softbank.ne.jp address so it is not a true “mobile phone email address”. That means, if your friends have there keitai spam filter set to reject mail not from a keitai, your mail will be rejected. It also means you can’t sign up for anything requiring a Japanese mobile address.
6) No obvious way to mail to a group of people. (Annoying)
7) No obvious way to forward a contacts information to anyone. (Shocking)
No obvious way to mail your own contact information to anyone. (Criminal)
9) This one is really annoying for me, if you mail to an address like*:
“naoto…34..mochitabenai.3..daiwarau..@whatever.ne.jp”
the phone warns you that you may be making an error in the recipient address due to the double period use.
10) “Japanese Mobile Only” sites are blocked (included m.mixi.jp)
11) No flash or java support.
12) The current batch of phones have manufacturing defects. These can even be seen on display models in the Apple store in Shibuya. Run your fingers forward and back along the left and right edge and you can feel that it is not flush and actually feels rough or sharp to the touch. I got mine replaced with a new phone because of this and the new phone still has the problem but to a lesser degree.

Nice points:
1) There are a few emoji selectable (4) by typing えもじ
2) Typing かおも allows you to select from 10 versions of the “happy” kaomoji.

The wrist-strap stuff also doesn’t interest my wife too much, though her neoprene cover has a hook for that and she uses it. Mostly, she had a problem with her fingernails, but she seems to be working out a way to use the touchscreen keyboard anyway.

Haven’t gotten my first bill yet. Apparently the S! Mail is not free when sent to other carrier’s devices, but at 8 or so yen per email of any size, 3 yen for smaller ones. I hadn’t known that, actually–just looked it up now. What a scam–from what I understand, POP email is free… unless they hide the charge for that even better. Well, I’ll see when I get the bills; if there’s a big surcharge on my bill, I’ll know what it’s for. We don’t, however, get detailed bills… maybe if the bill is over what we expect, we should opt for that service.

As for using it one-handed on the train, well, I don’t usually take the train, and when I do, I either am sitting, or I am leaning against a door or something and can use two hands. But I know one thing: even one-handed, I can type on the iPhone’s keyboard a *lot* faster than I was able to type English using the old keypads–at least 5 times faster, in fact. The keypad drove me positively nuts.

Tres: try shutting down and rebooting (hold down the sleep/wake button for 8-10 seconds) every day, or whenever the keyboard slows down more than once in a sitting. The iPhone is really a computer, and has similar memory issues. Rebooting clears that up, just like on your laptop or desktop. But yes, it is a lot more buggy than it should be.

As for Japanese input, is it really that much slower than on other cell phones? If so, then why? Is it the predictive henkan? Or are you just not used to the input style yet? As for first impressions, one of the worst problems for Apple products is that people are so used to using the badly-designed systems (usually designed by MS) that switching over means unlearning all of that, which many people interpret as the Mac being “hard to use.”

Another problem with comparisons of the iPhone with other smartphones is that the iPhones faults are dwelled on, while other keitai’s faults are glossed over; similarly, the iPhone’s “lack” of features (I use quote marks because the App Store makes up for most of these deficits, or will soon–even though the App Store is not even listed as a feature when keitai fanboys do comparisons) is bemoaned, usually on the presumption that most Japanese smartphones have all of the features people talk about, and somehow don’t pay a price in battery lifetime. And yes, the iPhone’s battery is not handily replaceable–but it *is* replaceable (it’s not soldered in like the 1G’s was). Not to mention that all features are considered equal somehow, when many of the other keitai’s features are of questionable value. Then there’s the usability point–I can use every single feature on the iPhone, haven’t come upon any feature that’s too hard to access or learn, very much unlike most other cell phones I use.

Okay, getting off my soapbox now. Sorry.

BTW, have you got a bill yet? S! Mail is not free, I think, but do you use POP mail on the whole? And can you use it one-thumbed hanging from a strap on the train?

PS: Yodobashi Camera were selling (yesterday was last day?) Eee PCs for 100 yen (and other sub-notebooks at 30,000 yen or more off) if you signed up for two years for an E-Mobile 3G data card at about 6,000 yen a month, which is much, much more tempting for me!

Marvin, considering most surveys before the launch were suggesting about 10% wanted to buy, the drop to under 3% who bought or intend to buy is significant, even given the margins of error.

As for women being underwhelmed, look at Q3, not Q1.

Nice balanced review.

Ken-Y-N,

You say that due to the small sample size, it is difficult to extrapolate the numbers. Yet because just 3 people are planning to buy, you say this suggests the euphoria has passed and that overall, women are rather underwhelmed. Aren’t you contradicting yourself by even coming to these conclusions? And when were surveys any real true indicator of anything? Most people just tick off answers to get them out of the way.

Other complaints: notification for email is strangely and badly designed. SoftBank email will activate notification immediately, but only visually–no vibration or sound. Stupid–it should make a sound. My wife has an iPhone too and is very much into keitai emailing, and hates the no-sound thing. Other email–regular POP email, GMail, MobileMe, etc.–will vibrate and make a sound, but (a) will check email only every 15 minutes at most, and (b) you cannot make the sound louder or different. Maybe one of the iPhone’s biggest weaknesses right there.

The 2.0 firmware seems a bit buggy, and it does crash sometimes; they have to get it acting more solidly. You have to shut down completely and restart every day or the bugginess increases. I don’t like that you can only control iTunes in a limited way without touching the screen–the headphone earplug set’s mic-controller will only pause/play or jump forward to the next song–no back, no fast-forward or -back, no volume control. I have to find some accessories that can fix that. The camera is less than impressive–it works, but you gotta hold it still or else get weird image distortion–but it does work, and the images are quite good enough for blogging, portraits, etc.

It lacks features that should have been there from the start, most noticeably selecting, copying, and pasting. Even though it could drain the battery faster, you should be able to set email checking to more often, and customize notification. You should be able to control email checking and other settings better–send email from an account but don’t check, for instance. They should allow you to turn off HTML graphics in email display. And having no spam filter is a big hassle. The battery does drain pretty quickly if you use most of the features a lot–but the charging cable is easy to carry around.

The GPS works best outdoors–indoors it is often off by a hundred meters, if it can identify your location at all. This is probably a standard GPS issue and not the iPhone’s fault.

That’s about all the bad stuff I can think of now. On the good side:

It’s extremely well-designed. Very cool, easy to hold, no slippage issues (for me at least), buttons easy to find and use. Using a $5 screen film, there’s almost no smudging. The screen is sharp, bright, and clear, the images crisp and beautiful. The touch screen responds very well. The interface is well-designed, easy to figure out, cool to use. Syncing has some issues, but works well, and is something I have lusted after for a long time–a cell phone that syncs with my Mac. At last!

The keyboard seems like it should be harder to use, but Apple did an excellent job making it easy. You really do have to trust the predictive correction–you can make a huge number of typos and the iPhone corrects most of them for you on the fly. That liveblogging I did was easy with the keyboard, no problem typing a good deal of text. You can get really fast on that thing with practice. In fact, I am now at the point where not having predictive correction on my laptop and desktop Mac is more and more annoying–I miss having my typos taken care of for me. They should add that feature to OS X! The multinational keyboards are good too–the romaji Japanese works as well as you would imagine, the suggestions offered are pretty good. The keypad kana input is well done–I can easily see being fluent at using the swipe feature to get the vowel-variants of a kana group.

Despite reports of YouTube being throttled, I haven’t noticed much slowdown; for a cellular network, it loads a lot faster than I expected. I tried a Windows Mobile out in a store a while back, using a 3G network, to load web pages, and it was painfully slow. Not the iPhone. Safari works pretty well, and while it’s nowhere near the same as a full-screen browser, I would not have imagined a cell phone could do it this well.

Email is not hard to do at all; I read most of my email on the iPhone, sometimes neglecting to keep my Mail.app on my laptop up to date. The iPod is, well, an iPod. Works great. And the phone is easy to use; having all the features of the address book in the phone is a big plus. My main regret is that I don’t use cell phones enough to make more use out of it.

Maps is the big winner for the phone, it’s the easiest to wow people and it’s a great utility to have handy wherever you are. Finding restaurants is all it’s talked up to be, and though Directions are not active on Google in Japan, everything else works great. Search for locations, see where people in your Contacts list live, find your way around… I’ve used this a lot and still haven’t run out of new uses for it.

But the big thing, the *real* killer app, is the App Store. That’s what makes the iPhone special in a way that’s hard to describe. It makes the iPhone into virtually anything you want it to be. Apps I’ve downloaded include:

** Ekitan: find out what trains to take and when to take them, now on the fly instead of having to do it in advance before you leave.
** WordPress: blog from anywhere on a wordpress blog–a big deal for me. Of course there’s TypePad for Movable Type people.
** Remote: control iTunes from anywhere in the house.
** VNC: control your Mac from anywhere in the house. Not very utilitous for me, but way cool.
** www.JDic: Japanese-English dictionary on your phone.
** Currency: get exchange rates anytime.
** AOL Radio: who needs an FM receiver limited to stations around you when you can get dozens of stations you like over the Internet?
** Speechcloud: speak contact names, dial their number. Not a time- or labor-saver, but cool to play with.
** Midomi: hum or sing a tune, and find the actual song surprisingly easily.
** Tasks: an advanced To-do list app.
** Convertor: convert units and measures.

And the games:

** Lander: a strange but fun little helicopter landing game
** Moonlight Mahjong Lite: very good Shanghai game
** Morocco, Othello: two different Reversi games, good in different ways
** Break Classic: a pretty good breakout game.
** Labyrinth: an obvious iPhone game, the old tilt-the-board-to-roll-the-marble-but-avoid-the-holes game
** iPint: more fun to show off to friends–drink a fake beer after showing how the accelerometer can help control an app.
** Jirbo Match: a pretty well-done “concentration” game; Jirbo makes lots of free games, some good, some so-so.

There are more I’ve downloaded, but those are the ones I use more often. And all of them are free. A few dozen new free apps every week. I’m looking at getting some of the paid apps, though many are priced too high for my tastes. There’s a good Mileage-tracking app I want to download, for instance, which costs a dollar–but I don’t want to pay ten bucks each for Scrabble, Chess, or Crossword puzzles. Some games will charge $5 or more when there are more than one free versions that play perfectly well. Some developers are dropping prices after first charging too much–an SF Bay Area BART map app similar to the free Ekitan was $15, but dropped to $4 after many complaints. I think the $1-$5 range is the sweet spot, where they’ll sell a lot more copies and so make a lot more money than if they price at $10 or more.

Apps I am waiting for: PowerPoint/Keynote remote controller. If they can make “Remote,” they can make a presentation controller. Also: a QR code reader… that works. There are one or two out there, but they don’t work well at all.

One complaint: a lot of developers make apps that only work in the U.S., but then put them on the Japanese app store. Stupid.

Anyway, that’s the impression I have so far. Much more good than bad; I love this little thing. Was that the kind of review you were looking for?