Some Observations On Purchasing a Softbank iPhone 3GS in Japan

Nov 17, 09:06 PM

As many of you may know, I’ve recently moved to Tokyo for a year. I had been holding off on buying a new iPhone 3GS for a while and the plan was to buy a new one when I got to Japan. Well, now that I have done that I figured I would write up some of my thoughts about the process.

• The first generation iPhone does not work in Japan. The GSM radio simply doesn’t talk to the towers and fails to see them. The 3G and 3GS iPhones both work in Japan on the Softbank network.

• I should have been adding international country codes to my phone numbers in Mac OS X Address Book all along. There seem to be a few Applescripts available for modifying your contacts to include these based on some sort of logic. Running scripts against my address book (which syncs with google using some sort of magic) frightens me.

• Mac OS X Address book is pretty bad for international mailing addresses. Choosing wether or not to display in Japanese or US format is a global setting. It should be per-address. Just because I am American doesn’t mean all of my contacts have US formatted mailing addresses.

• Japanese phone numbers have a leading 0 that must be dropped in some circumstances. I’ve added all of my phone numbers to Address Book with the country code but without the leading 0 and it seems to work ok so far.

• You need to add two new custom number formats in Address Book for Japanese phone numbers to be properly formatted in a reliable way. I was happy that this is an option in Address Book.

• In Japan, the “Sent from my iPhone” signature at the bottom of emails is actually useful information as you will be charged a per-30-second call rate outside of the Softbank network. Calls within Softbank are free. Other iPhone users are very excited to know you will be joining their “team” when you tell them that you are joining Softbank.

• Similarly, I’ve been told that text messages will probably not survive the jump from the Softbank network to others. I’ll have to test this some more.

• Previously purchased applications can be synced to the Japanese iPhone without issue.

• The relationship between iPhone App Store, the iTunes music store, carrier signup, Apple registration, etc… are all a little confusing. There is a Japanese iTunes Music Store that has different music than the American music store. It appears this is also the case for applications. The option to change your store is buried deep within the App Store application. You would need a Japanese credit card to switch to the Japanese store.

• Data usage is metered in packets. You pay per packet up to a dollar maximum per month. Maybe Japanese people have an intuitive understanding of how many packets a given website or email will generate but I have no idea. It strikes me as a bad way to quantify the service. You can bet I’ll be checking my first bill closely.

• When signing up, we were put in some mandatory plans that we were told we could later opt out of. I hate this sort of up-selling tactic and every time a salesperson gives it to me I hear alarm bells. Interestingly, one of the options we can later drop is the iPhone visual voicemail and call conferencing.

• The iPhone is subsidized in a strange way: you pay for it up front or in monthly installments and they then reduce the cost of the phone plan. With the older 3G iPhone the device ends up being “free”. The subsidy doesn’t start until 3 months into the contract which wasn’t really explained to us until we were well into the signup process. That came as a bit of a surprise to us.

• If you are switching from another Japanese carrier, Softbank will give you a pair of cheap slippers with the mascot dog on them. Asako was obsessed with getting these slippers but alas, it didn’t happen. When I actually got a good look at them, they are simply normal house slippers with half of a stuffed dog sewn onto them.

• They had some other promotion going on where you could get either a “giant strap” stuffed animal of the Softbank mascot or a set of coupons that you mail in each month for a $10 refund. I can’t see how people would give up $50 for a stuffed animal, but I think that it’s actually a popular option. They scanned one of the coupons with a barcode reader. I think that was so you can’t get both of the offers.

• They let us pick the last four digits of our phone numbers. It reminded me of the Google Voice signup process. For me, having that extra bit of freedom actually gave me a little bit of stress. Luckily Asako quickly just picked the same last four digits of her family’s home number for both of us and it was done.

• They ran some sort of eligibility check on me that required my passport (as an Id I suppose) as well as my medical card. There were other options for identification to use such as a foreign residence card but the girl doing the paperwork told Asako it was easier to pass with the medical card.

• I have to figure out a good way to pay for it monthly as I believe American Express charges a 2% service fee for Yen-to-Dollar conversion. That was part of the reason why we paid for the phones upfront and in cash.

• We bought the phones at Yodobashi Camera and the process took quite a long time. We spent about 45 minutes waiting while they went through all of the paperwork and another hour at a coffee shop while they activated the SIM cards. Then we picked them up and paid for them. The experience was really quite difficult and very far from the Apple’s ideal process. I would be very interested in seeing what the process at the Apple store itself is like. Originally we went there and they had a reservation system with a few hours wait.

• Yodobashi Camera obviously cannot discount the iPhone itself but they have a point card system where we got 10% points for the purchase. Since we bought the phones outright, we now have a substantial amount of points on our card. We’re probably going to use them to pick up some cases or a monitor.

Overall, I felt the process was pretty tedious. I was glad to get home and get the phone synced up. I was really glad Asako was there to handle the paperwork details. I’ve heard that there are some employees at the larger stores like Yodobashi that speak english. I can only imagine how long it would have taken if I had been doing it myself with someone who spoke English as a second language.

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