The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Apple is meeting with Japan’s #1 (DoCoMo) and #3 (Softbank Corp.) mobile operators for the right to carry the iPhone. This is big news because well, Japan is the world’s 2nd largest economy and has a culture geared towards gadget-obsession - and of course the iPhone has been many’s pick for gadget of the year.

Apple has had previous deals in place with SoftBank including the promotion where when you bought a cellphone you got a free iPod Mini, but DoCoMo is now said to be the first choice for such a deal that will no doubt hinge on which gave Apple a better revenue sharing percentage.

Interestingly enough DoCoMo doesn’t have an EDGE network, so any iPhone there would have to be 3G - which makes sense anyways since I doubt the Japanese public would take a second look at an iPhone if it only ran at EDGE speeds (whereas we over in the U.S. are used to our crappy connection speeds).

Posted on December 19th, 2007 by admin
Filed under: iPhone News