Probably. I’ve been waiting for it to come out here. It has all the stuff I want, little that I don’t want, and has multi-lingual input and read support, which is pretty darn important to me. Contrary to popular belief, Japanese phones aren’t all that great. Smartphone features are not a priority; stuff like TV reception, being able to put shitty little icons on your phone photos, and accessing the internet ghettoes — like DoCoMo’s iMode — that are optimized for regular cell phone screen sizes and controls are.
The problem is that I’m on DoCoMo, which has better coverage than other carriers, and I’m on a family plan that greatly reduces my monthly costs and the cost of calls to family members. The rumors were correct: SoftBank is the carrier that will have the iPhone, which means I’m going to have to switch carriers to use it. I’ll probably wait a bit until the adoption rush dies down first. SoftBank hasn’t had good reliability in the past. I expect the uptake to be substantially less than most other countries, though.
iPods, for example, have less than 60% of the market in electronic music players here, while they’re around 85% in the US. The Xbox 360, while having an incredible game library, with more coming, and a kick-ass online service compared to the PS3’s mostly lagging and lackluster library and very basic online component, is still tanking overall in this market.
The Japanese tend to be very resistant to foreign devices in the first place, and the basic response that most Japanese have had to the iPhone features is, “Meh, there are other phones that have that.” Which of course totally misses the point, as is usual for Japan. The first iPhone didn’t have anything that other smart phones didn’t — if you compared based only on a list of features — but the interface and software design was so good that nearly everyone who actually used one, whether they like or detest Apple in general, has liked the hell out of using it. Customer satisfaction is at 80%* for this thing. That’s totally unheard of in the mobile market.
Still, I expect it to do only moderately well here. It’s not a native brand, and while well designed, it doesn’t have the laundry list of features that Japanese customers expect from a phone. Perversely, most of the stuff that does well overseas doesn’t get much play here. There are native video games and anime that are massively popular overseas that most Japanese have never heard of, while tech and other merchandise that dominates in the West struggles to get any traction at all.
*Rubicon consulting report (PDF) on the iPhone and implications for the mobile market.