Madplanet

Softbank gets the iPhone

Another of the one-line press releases we’ve become used to:

“SOFTBANK MOBILE Corp. today announced it has signed an agreement with Apple® to bring the iPhone™ to Japan later this year.”

Which means 3G, obviously, since no Japanese carrier has GSM or EDGE networks. (There still appears to be widespread confusion about that fact.)

Presumably DoCoMo and KDDI were too inflexible both on services and the phone itself; DoCoMo had said in a previous interview that it would want to tweak the hardware, for example. Softbank, however, is eminently more flexible, as evidenced by its MVNO arrangement with Disney.