How Steve Jobs Got the iPhone Into Japan 104
hcs_$reboot writes "Masatoshi Son, SoftBank CEO, remembers the early days when he tried to cut a deal with Steve Jobs in order to be the first to offer the not-even-named-iPhone-yet- 'new phone' from Apple, back in 2005. At the time, Son didn't even own a mobile carrier. He then purchased Vodafone, and was indeed the first to sell the iPhone in 2008 (then Au-Kddi in 2011, and DoCoMo in 2013). Today, 75% of smartphones sold in Japan are iPhones."
Re:BULLSHIT! (Score:4, Interesting)
And anything else will also be the same way. I have been trying to use the Ubuntu phone releases for 2 years now and they have the exact same problems that geeks hate on android and iphone. It also is a walled garden (Yes kids android IS a walled garden, go ahead and install a new hardware driver in your phone)
Ubuntu phone suffers from a lot of the same problem because it is designed by a company looking for profits. not by a bunch of engineers and programmers that want to make something powerful and extendable.
we will NEVER get a cellphone that is perfect for "geeks" not in the sense of a tiny pocket device. now if you instead think outside that box and think in the lines of a "deck" like in the game shadowrun or the TV show "almost human" that is your computer in a larger formfactor that you always have with you, then use a small display+audio device to use the cellular modem/board in the "deck". this means having to carry around essentially a 13" laptop everywhere (OH THE HORROR!) but it will allow someone the best of all worlds. their choice of OS, their choice of Software with full open protocols. you pick the cellular board (arduino type cellular board, someone out there has an LTE type that has a full open control, data, and audio channels) and interface it to your hardware.
and honestly with some of the arduino high power quad core clones out there, it's possible to make it smallish. will it be a tiny paper thin thing? nope, but it will be better than anything your non techie friends will ever own.