NTT Docomo getting the iPhone would be industry-changing in Japan.
Docomo has by far the best voice and data network in the country, and the users in Japan have been clamoring for it for as long as I can remember. In fact, many of my friends there carry a voice phone on Docomo and an iPhone on Softbank (the 3rd largest carrier which until late this year, was the sole carrier offering the iPhone. They have since been joined by KDDI, the second largest carrier, with the launch of iPhone4S. When this was announced, Softbank's stock price plummeted).
From what I understand, NTT used to be a state-owned entity, and thus their capital infrastructure is seemingly oblivious to the limitations of investment returns. Docomo phones work perfectly fine in the middle of the mountain when all other carriers' phones cease to function.
This being said, I'm skeptical whether they will even choose to carry the iPhone5 (the article only mentions the iPad3), because their iMode service is a massive cash cow. It's been said that the reason they didn't get the iPhone in the first place was because the two sides couldn't come to terms on iPhone's possible iMode support.
That's true now, but I think by mid-2012, the "noise" of 4G would be too loud for Apple to ignore. Android has already captured the hearts and wallets of most consumers out there--no need to add "lacks 4G" to the list of iPhone minuses when it comes to purchasing a new phone.
It's not a really that big a minus when you think about how common WiFi hotspots are, plus Android only really captures two audiences: those without money (cheaper phones), and those who want "openness" - let's face it, nobody actually would prefer an Android over an iPhone if they could pick either and both were equally open-architecture.
The prevalence of WiFi is largely dependent on where you live. Even mildly outside of large cities it's difficult to find open networks. I think a lot of people prefer Android not just because of its openness, but because they're much more customizable (although I suppose you could argue this is the same thing). Some of the android hardware is pretty competitive, if not better, as well and with LTE bringing in 20+mbps speeds it's a pretty nice feature.
Even in large cities, availability of wifi can be very hit or miss.
Based on my completely anecdotal data from a few different cities, the wifi situation was actually quite a bit better a couple of years ago than it is today. Granted, the number of wifi points you can see keeps growing, but the percentage of them that are locked down has also increased, so there's actually less points available.
Part of this is people getting wise to security, which is overall a good thing (if inconvenient for a harmless wifi poacher that just wants to check his own email). But increasingly this is also due to retail places putting limits on or eliminating their wifi due to realizing it tends to result in people who are more loiterers than customers.
The problem with this is that for a lot of people, these points are invalid.
The screen isn't higher resolution, it's just physically larger (which, for people with small hands, is a negative). 4G isn't available everywhere, and it can be a pretty substantial battery drain (though better in recent devices). NFC has very few uses so far, other than communicating with other NFC Android phones.
I assume that 'mobile hangouts' refers to Google+? Few people I know actually use this feature (or Google+ in general, though perhaps your circles differ). Especially the 'typical users' I know of don't care. The Galaxy Nexus on ICS is certainly a MUCH faster phone than previous Android devices, but I've never seen a review saying it's any faster than the iPhone.
'Better memory' is ambiguous. Larger? Faster?
And cutting-edge OS - well, iOS 5 has a lot of cutting-edge features, such as Siri. There are few features in ICS that the average person would want.
Now don't get me wrong - you made your own informed choices. For the majority of non-geeks I know, however, none of these choices would factor in. It all comes down to what's supported (accessory vendors), what's got the apps (iOS), and what other people are using (iPhones).
In other words: you aren't any more representative than I am. Granted, the parent's 'nobody would prefer…' is definitely incorrect, but I feel pretty confident saying that the majority of people either don't care what phone they have, or prefer iPhones.
>nobody actually would prefer an Android over an iPhone if they could pick either and both were equally open-architecture.
Got anything to back that up? The sales data shows otherwise. It's hard to argue that out of the hundred million Android devices sold everyone who bought one cares how open the platform is. There is a huge subset of people who would never buy an Apple device regardless of the platform model.
Even if I didn't care about being locked into apple's ecosystem (it is possible to root iphones after all) I still would be forced to choose between android, blackberry, and winphone models since no iphones have a physical keyboard and that's an important feature for me.
I've never understood the appeal of this. Why not just tape a debit card to the back of your phone? I've got a VISA with "Blink". It hasn't exactly revolutionized paying for things.
It's not really a technological advance for me to have to take my phone out to pay for something.
NFC is useful for more than just payments. Need to exchange contact info? Or files? Or URLs? NFC works excellently for that. I predict it will end up being pretty popular.
WiFi Direct or Bluetooth seem to work well for that. Or a camera and a QRCode. Or infrared was the cool way to do that back in the day; I remember that my Palm Pilot could do that. We have a billion ways to do these things that people don't seem to really need to do. I think it's just a gimmick.
None of those technologies worked very well though. WiFi direct and bluetooth have the problem of being too long range. How does the transmitter determine who the receiver is, for example? This is why they made "bump" apps, because it was a useful kludge to solve the hand-shake / setup problem. And IR never worked very well and was far from ubiquitous, and hasn't been present on modern smartphones regardless.
NFC's advantage is that it just plain works. We'll see if it catches on, but it does cover a set of use cases that is fairly meaningful and has yet to be served by a truly robust and seamless technology.
At this point they should really consider dropping the "suffix" to the iPhone model name. They've kind of dug themselves into a hole, name wise, since this upcoming one will be the 6th version of the model. They could name it 5, which would probably only upset us geeks that actually know how many models there have been. They could name it 6, but then the general population would start wondering where 5 went. They could even just name it 4G and procrastinate solving the problem for another 12-18 months.
Or they could just go the way of a lot of their other products and just advertise it as the new iPhone (like the new MacBook Air, etc).
It means "Our last major phone model had 3 in its name". Apple isn't going to go from iPhone 4S to iPhone 6, it'd just look like they can't count to most of the public.
> "which would probably only upset us geeks that actually know how many models there have been"
I thought the geeks were upset that the 4S wasn't a "real" upgrade anyway? It seems to me they can't have it both ways. It either counts, or it doesn't. (Not that logical consistency has ever been their strong suit.)
That said, I agree. The suffix was unnecessary and rather lame from the start. Moving on from that not only feels inevitable, but an overdue correction of a mistake.
I remember hearing the reason behind that in one of the BUILD conference talks this year. Apparently (and sadly) there are tons of high-profile Windows apps that would completely break and stop working all-together if the only thing they did in the next version of Windows was bump the major version number up one and changed nothing else. Developers hard-coded many portions of their product to depend on specific version numbers existing (instead of looking for available APIs).
They learned their lesson after Vista, which is why 7 only bumped the minor version number up, and 8 will follow in its footsteps.
That's a very good point; however they still offer models n-1 and n-2 (and will probably continue that trend for the foreseeable future) so they need some distinction for that.
Docomo has by far the best voice and data network in the country, and the users in Japan have been clamoring for it for as long as I can remember. In fact, many of my friends there carry a voice phone on Docomo and an iPhone on Softbank (the 3rd largest carrier which until late this year, was the sole carrier offering the iPhone. They have since been joined by KDDI, the second largest carrier, with the launch of iPhone4S. When this was announced, Softbank's stock price plummeted).
From what I understand, NTT used to be a state-owned entity, and thus their capital infrastructure is seemingly oblivious to the limitations of investment returns. Docomo phones work perfectly fine in the middle of the mountain when all other carriers' phones cease to function.
This being said, I'm skeptical whether they will even choose to carry the iPhone5 (the article only mentions the iPad3), because their iMode service is a massive cash cow. It's been said that the reason they didn't get the iPhone in the first place was because the two sides couldn't come to terms on iPhone's possible iMode support.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-mode
Call me an interested observer.