Before the iPhone ever came out here, there was prognostication of doom. Japanese will hate the iPhone because it pales in comparison to what is out in Japan. People won’t like it because it doesn’t have emoji or because it doesn’t have a convenient strap hook.

But then, when the iPhone went on sale, huge, unprecedented lines formed to buy it. It didn’t take long for this to be forgotten and we started hearing again how the Japanese detested the iPhone. Meanwhile, I’ve started seeing it everywhere; in restaurants, used by people on train platforms, in the hands of people on the street. It’s one of the more common–and certainly more recognizable–phone models in a country with hundreds of models out there. And people who don’t have it know about it; even people who don’t get it say they think it’s cool and they want one. It might be one of the highest-profile cell phones in Japan, period. Just today I was at immigration to pick up my visa, and I got out my iPhone to while away some time. Immediately, three women to my left started having a long discussion about what plans were available for the iPhone.

The whole “Japan hates the iPhone” meme got a weird boost yesterday when Wired magazine published an article titled, “Why the Japanese Hate the iPhone.” What’s weird about it is that it was (and even after edits, still is) filled with inaccuracies. It misquoted Japanese tech reviewers, most notably Nobuyuki Hayashi, completely skewing what they said to change a quite favorable view of the iPhone into a negative, even dismissive view. AppleInsider does a pretty good job of laying out the badly-done piece.

Even after edits, the article reeks of know-nothingness. In the first paragraph, it claims, “the handset is selling so poorly it’s being offered for free.” The iPhone has been selling pretty well, in fact; Hayashi points to the iPhones’ sales figures as fairly strong considering that mobile sales dropped sharply in 2008. The “free” 8GB iPhone (the 16GB is half price) is a promotion, the kind SoftBank is famous for, and is seen as a way to both steal market share from competitors and to clear out inventories for an expected June launch of the next iPhone model (the promotion ends in May).

I could go through the whole article, but let me just focus on a few paragraphs:

Besides cultural opposition, Japanese citizens possess high, complex standards when it comes to cellphones. The country is famous for being ahead of its time when it comes to technology, and the iPhone just doesn’t cut it.

Actually, the iPhone floors most Japanese who see it; Japanese phones are packed with features, but those features are complex and hard to access; the iPhone’s easy-to-use interface and multi-touch screen are big attention-grabbers with Japanese keitai users. Maybe the hardcore uber-nerd crowd reacts the way the Wired article says, but not most Japanese.

As for “cultural opposition,” they’re full of it–Japan was “culturally opposed” to non-Japanese music players–and yet the iPod now dominates the market.

For example, Japanese handset users are extremely into video and photos — and the iPhone has neither a video camera nor multimedia text messaging. And a highlight feature many in Japan enjoy on their handset is a TV tuner, according to Kuittinen.

Actually, no. You don’t see too many people actually using these features, mostly because they are too hard to use. As a previous Wired piece correctly quoted the Japanese tech guru, “while being able to watch TV anywhere is a spectacular idea, there’s no signal in the subways, and even above ground, the sound cuts out every few seconds.” Fact is, I don’t often see people using those features on their keitai. They are widely considered as cool bells and whistles, but ultimately not used very much.

What else bugs the Japanese about the iPhone? The pricing plans, Kuittinen said. Japan’s carrier environment is very competitive, which equates to relatively low monthly rates for handsets. The iPhone’s monthly plan starts at about $60, which is too high compared to competitors, Kuittinen added.

Again, not so much. Most plans in Japan cost at least that much, and most cost more, especially with full Internet connectivity and unlimited data plans. What hurts SoftBank is not the overall price of the plan, but rather SoftBank’s high per-minute charges. Most of my students express deep envy over the iPhone, but say they can’t afford it because it costs 42 yen per minute, and SoftBank’s cheap White Plan only allows free calls among fellow SoftBank users. Were most students already SoftBank users, the iPhone would take off; since most are not, calling their friends would be way too expensive. SoftBank must somehow reach a critical mass before the free-calls deal means much to most people.

Gizmodo followed up on Wired’s story, but got even more wrong. They also misquoted Hayashi, claiming that he fault’s the iPhone’s lack of emoji as a reason it’s failing. Except Hayashi didn’t say that, he said it used to lack emoji, but SoftBank “did a good follow up job” by getting Apple to add that.

Gizmodo shows up a key element in the “iPhone is doomed in Japan” scenario painters: using whatever excuses are handy, not rational, in predicting or proclaiming doom. When the iPhone came out, it was the lack of emoji, a wrist strap, 1-seg TV tuner, electronic wallet feature, and QR Code reader. While the iPhone still lacks the e-wallet feature, it now has emoji & QR Code readers, you can get a 1-seg add-on, and straps are easily added using neoprene covers with strap hooks. So is it mostly cool now?

Of course not. Why? Because of the phone’s “high monthly plan, lack of multimedia messaging support, and dependence on a computer for syncing.” The iPhone is already seeing a big cut in the pricing plan, and frankly, the computer syncing issue is bogus–most Japanese people have computers today. But when these issues dissipate like the old ones did, how much you want to bet that they’ll find a list of new reasons? It’s a sucker bet: some people are just latched onto the idea that the iPhone will never succeed in Japan, and until its sales become undeniably massive, they’ll just keep on finding excuses, most likely based upon why the iPhone doesn’t include every single feature in every other cell phone in Japan.

You gotta love this: Al Jazeera reporter goes to interview Mullah Zaif, the former ambassador to Pakistan for the Taliban, which shunned many things western, including most of its technology. The man walks in, sits down… and whips out his iPhone. Yep, his iPhone. Then he proceeds to rave about it: “I’m addicted. The internet is great on this, very fast.” He then proceeds to show it off for the reporter. Really, I had to double check the web site to make sure it was really Al Jazeera and not some satire site. Even had to inspect the photo closely to make sure it wasn’t a Photoshop job.

Is Apple converting the Taliban with its subversive seductiveness?

In Japan, QR codes are used quite a bit, so I thought I might give my impressions of the various free QR code reading apps for the iPhone. There are several free QR code readers out there, and they work with varying results. One problem often encountered is the fact that the iPhone’s camera is not intended for macro use and close-up images blur too much–so unless the QR code you want to scan is relatively large, the iPhone won’t be able to handle it. That said, here are the reviews, from worst to best.

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In the “don’t bother” category:

The worst app I tried was iDecode from Haploid. A lot not to like here. For one thing, it failed to scan a barcode where all the other readers succeeded; almost as bad is the fact that it’s ad-supported, which means that if you don’t like ads sliding across the bottom of the screen fairly frequently, then you won’t like this app.

The next worse I tried was 2-D Sense. It allows for the use of a wide range of code types and has fairly customizable settings. You also are given then chance to rescale the code for better reading reliability, something all the apps I tried save for iDecode had. However, although it was able to scan larger QR codes (it had trouble with medium-sized ones that other readers could handle), I couldn’t make it save the codes or go to the site that was revealed. Maybe I was doing something wrong, but after trying several times, I couldn’t make it work. Additionally, if there is a failed scan, you have to retake the entire photo to try again. To top it all off, it crashed once while I was trying to use it. It got a little further than iDecode and shows promise, but ultimately failed to do the job.

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In the middle are these two apps:
NeoReader [iTunes link] is a simple but fairly effective reader. It does its job, though with very few options. One problem was that on standard settings, it doesn’t confirm the scan, instead it just jumps straight to the page (something you probably won’t want to do); you have to go into the settings to change that. Otherwise, it seems to be a competent reader.

Also in the category of “simple but it works” is Snappr [iTunes link]; it scans, it reads, it goes. Not much more to say.

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Two readers stood out as superior, and have similar names: Barcode and Barcodes.

Barcode [iTunes link] was one of the first readers made available. It has a nice, customized code target area which makes pretty clear exactly where the code should be when you zoom and adjust the image you took. It reads to code reliably, and saves results you want. There are options for recognizing email addresses and phone numbers from QR codes and then sending email or dialing a number, but I could not get them to work.

The best I tried, however, was BarcodeS (plural, emphasis on the “S” mine) [iTunes link], not to be confused with “Barcode” (singular). Barcodes worked the fastest and most reliably. Additionally, it can read QR-coded phone numbers and call the number up, something that Barcode failed to do for me.

One more point in favor of Barcodes: there is one QR code I found which, in almost all readers I tried, yielded an error in the URL it expressed; almost all readers got a long string of junk following the URL, which had to be pared down in Safari. All the other readers I tried got the junk URL, but Barcodes alone successfully weeded out only the working address. If you want a simple, easy-to-use, and reliable QR code reader, then Barcodes is probably the best–but it might be nice to have Barcode as a backup, especially if they ever get the phone & email thing worked out.

Both Barcode and Barcodes have the ability to scan images saved in your iPhone’s photo album, so you can snap quick pictures on the go (or with better-quality photo apps like Darkroom) and then scan the QR code later.

In a recent survey, the iPhone was voted the best smartphone in Japan. Because this was not a scientific survey, one has to take it less than faithfully; however, the fact that the iPhone won the survey by such a wide margin says quite a bit.

This despite all the naysaying about how and why the iPhone would fail. It was probably not even related to the iPhone getting emoji, or the add-on One-seg TV viewer, or having phone-strap capability by adding a rubber sleeve/cover. The fact is simply that the phone is way cool. I do not mean that flippantly; I have seen people in my school, for example, using a variety of cell phones and they never get mentioned; however, whenever I am using my iPhone, it always draws attention. Everyone knows about the phone and is curious about it. Not to mention that I’m starting to see it more and more (another tenant in my building, passers-by on the street) which is not too common with the plethora of cell phone models out there.

Probably the main reason why the iPhone has not completely dominated the market is because it is linked to SoftBank; had DoCoMo been the carrier, it would likely be far more popular.

It is interesting how the iPhone’s App Store psychology works. Developers are having trouble because people seem unwilling to shell out money for the apps–sometimes even when the app costs only a dollar or two. Free versions have their perils–make them too good, and people won’t pay for the full version; make them too annoying or limited, and people will be turned off. “Comet Cowboy” was a good example of balance–they made the free version fun and addictive, so you wanted to buy the paid version. (I did.) It would be nice to have Demo versions that would work for a limited time, especially for the more expensive apps. The problem is, if Apple did that, then free apps would likely dry up quite a bit.

I find myself reacting to prices unreasonably as well. Normally, I don’t even blink at dropping a few bucks here and there–taking a bus where I could walk, buying a snack or something, buying a song off of iTunes. But for some reason, I balk at paying even 99 cents for an app which I probably would enjoy a lot more than a bus ride or a quick snack. Strange how that works–context can make a big difference.

There’s a similar effect with currencies: many people find themselves unwilling to pay an amount in one currency which they would not think twice about spending if the price were expressed in a different currency.

I was kind of hoping for a game like Boggle, one where you get a selection of letters and you try to find as many words as you can from what’s available. The iPhone would lend itself to such a game, in fact, as you could shake the phone to randomize the letters and set them each time. Of course, Boggle is copyrighted and all that, so the app would cost a bit, but I wanted some game like that.

Turns out, there’s an app out which could be about as fun–depending on what version you get. The game is called Word Wrap, and it’s a Boggle-like game where you are given six letters and must figure out as many 3- to 6-letter words as possible which can be spelled with just those letters. You start out with the letters and a list of dashed-out word blanks which show you how many words are possible and how many letters each is.

The game is fun and addictive–but there’s a catch I explain at the end of this review, so for the time being, you may not want to download this.

To enter words, tap the letters in sequence, and they appear in the white blanks above the letter buttons. If you want to take a letter back, tap the white blank with the letter and it’ll go back.

The “Warp” button jumbles the letters–a useful function as it helps you rearrange them quickly to prompt you to find new combinations (see image below). I’m not sure how useful the “Last” button is, as it just shows you the last word you tried. When you have a word you think is valid, tap “Got It” and if it’s one of the words, it will appear in the list. If it’s not valid, then it doesn’t appear and the white boxes blank out for the next try.

As you compile the list, the words appear in order of length first and then alphabetically–meaning that if you’re stumped at some point, you can use the list as a clue in itself. In the example at right, there’s a word yet to be found which comes between “NOR” and “ONE.” That narrows down the possibilities, as is would have to start with one of the two letters; if “N,” then the next two letters come after “OR,” and if “O,” then the next two letters come before “NE.” In this case, that word is “NUN.” At the end of the game, all of the missed words are shown in red.

The “Word Warp” feature mixing up the letters, helping find new combinations.

There are several problems, however. First is that you get bogged down with the three-letter words, and they often repeat and can be inane. Some two-letter words in plural form are accepted, but some aren’t; some abbreviations work, others don’t. And often you’ll be supposed to know words that don’t register as words. When I’m stumped, I start entering words that I don’t think are words but which follow spelling rules, and often I’ll hit something. I mean, “Elan”? “Ulnae”? They didn’t bother to weed out the arcane or technical words.

On the good side: in the prefs, you can activate “alternate” words, which lets swear words be recognized; but better, you can alter the time limit. One minute is not nearly enough, for example. I prefer three minutes, but even that can be too short when there are up to 32 words–not enough time to enter them all even without getting stumped much. It goes up to 30 minutes, then to unlimited time.

Now the down side, and after that, the BIG down side: ads. If you got the original version of the app, it’s not so bad. At the start and at the end of a game, you get an ad screen; tap it and a prompt appears, and you can dismiss the ad. The first version of the app, the ads are not intrusive at all–you have to dismiss them every 15 or 20 minutes, between plays, and it’s not such a big deal.

Now the BIG bad point: the developers apparently decided that their original ad rate was too lenient, and probably too few people were clicking through to the sponsors. So they released an “update” to “fix bugs,” but really all it did was to change the ad display settings–to something really obnoxious. Apparently, the new version’s ads pop up every time you complete a level, stay up for a while before you can dismiss them, require more taps to dismiss them, and apparently even pop up in mid-play sometimes. Ironically, the upgrade that was supposed to introduce “bug fixes” actually introduced a bug where the clock runs too fast–that in addition to the ads. If you download it now, you get the bad version.

Reviews of the app, before in the 5-star area, have started to tank as people who fell for the “upgrade” scam are complaining in droves. What was a great free app with a minor ad distraction has, apparently, been ruined–unless the developers decide to put it back.

If you really, really want and app like this, you can buy the 99 cent version without ads. If you got the first version of the free one, DON’T UPGRADE! Otherwise, you maybe should stay away from it–until it becomes clear that they made it better. I hate to even introduce a game where the developers are acting so dubiously, but the first version is very fun, and it might be worth it to some people to ante up the dollar.

Me, I’m sticking with the first version.

While the Mac vs. PC rivalry is well-known and widely waged, there is another Apple-Microsoft war which is far less know: Zune vs. iPod. Most people with iPods just ignore the Zune, but Zune owners tend to hate the iPod, Apple, and Apple enthusiasts with a passion. And there is the inevitable “which is better” debate, though again, it’s usually just the Zune fans talking amongst themselves.

One of the most common ways that Zune users claim superiority is to use selective comparisons. When comparing the products of the two companies, Zune users invariably compare the top Zune model with Apple’s bottom-of-the-line iPod Classic model, which, naturally, gives the greatest advantage to the Zune. The iPod Touch and iPhone are considered “different” enough that a comparison cannot even be attempted.

The justification is usually based upon an imagined alignment–that the Zune and the iPod Classic just naturally align with each other, and the iPod Touch and iPhone are completely different machines that can be discounted and ignored. The most common argument to support this is that the iPod Classic has hard disk storage like the Zune, so there.

The problem is, that doesn’t quite work, for at least a few different reasons. The first is the fact that all Zunes and iPods/iPhones compete directly with each other. Whatever features any of them have, almost nobody is going to buy more than one for personal use. That is, you’re not going to see someone buy a Zune and and an iPhone. In this sense, all of these players compete with each other, in that the purchase of one of the units generally precludes the purchase of another.

Another reason that argument doesn’t compute is that they’re all different. The Zune no more lines up with the iPod Classic than it does with the iPod Touch or the iPhone. Sure, the Zune and iPod classic both have hard disk storage and a 320 x 240 screen; however, the Zune and iPod Touch share roughly the same screen size and WiFi. There are features all share, and features unique to each player. Consider the chart below (click on it to see the full size), and you’ll see that the Zune doesn’t really line up with any Apple product. (Although the Flash Zune and iPod Nano line up pretty well.)

Then there’s the idea of alignment by media type, which falls flat when you realize that the Flash Zune then gets lumped together with the iPod Touch. Doesn’t work anymore, does it?

So comparisons between the Zune 120 and iPod Classic 120 are very comforting to the Zune crowd, but they really don’t constitute an equal match. Just as Microsoft decided on a certain feature set with both of their Zune player categories, so did Apple with their five categories–but because each company had different objectives and different ranges of models, none lined up perfectly. Everything is a matter of choice. You could just as easily have a Zune 80 and iPod Touch 8 shoot-out. The problem is, with the exception of storage capacity, the iPod Touch would completely blow the Zune 80 out of the water. But that’s a lot less comforting to Zune fans, so let’s not go there.

You could even compare the Zune with the iPhone. Zune fans would shoot that down instantly because of the iPhone’s added cost for a cell contract. However, there’s no reason to do so, as most people have cell phones and would pay for the contract anyway; in fact, the iPhone is a better savings in that respect as you don’t have to buy a separate cell phone, and is more convenient as you have only one device to carry around. Zune users might argue that the iPhone looks cheaper because of the cell carrier subsidizing the costs–except that PC users have no problem discounting such subsidies when they crow about $400 PCs which require a subscription to an Internet service.

The bottom line is, we’re comparing Apples and, well, Zunes. In order to make any comparison, you have to weigh each machine as a complete package. Is a touch screen a big deal? Would you prefer an FM radio or streaming Internet radio over WiFi and/or a 3G network? How do the interfaces work for you? How much memory do you really need? (Surprisingly, I find my iPhone’s 16GB perfectly satisfying; you may not.) Are a handful of games sufficient, or would you like a cornucopia of thousands of apps? Do GPS and an accelerometer sound good to you? Do you like to have access to email and the Internet wherever you are? How often do you actually use wireless syncing or social sharing? Does having a camera built in matter? How about avoiding carrying a two separate devices? How much do you like the styles of each?

Then work out how much each is worth to you, and look at the prices. Then buy. Just keep in mind that the whole Zune-iPod Classic paradigm is a crock. It’s pretty much a subjective comparison any way you look at it.

SteadyCam is available for the first 3000 users free; it just came out, so I don’t know how long it’ll last. But it works. As advertised, it allows you to take sharper, more in-focus shots under dark or difficult circumstances. It probably won’t help for action shots, though–it steadies the shot by waiting for your hand to stop shaking, then grabbing that frame as an image.

Here’s a shot, reduced from the original size, to show you what I was shooting–the cityscape at night out my balcony window:

I took six images–three with the SteadyCam app, and three with the native Camera app. Here are the same part of all six images; click to see a blow-up:

The three on the left were taken with the SteadyCam app. The first and third images were with intentional hand shaking–though neither image shows it. The ones on the right were taken with the regular camera app–the first one with a strong effort to keep the camera still, the second and third with hand shaking similar to what I did with the SteadyCam app. As you can see, even my best effort holding the camera still with the native app did not do as well as any of the shots taken with the new app.

In short, as I said, it seems to work.

Another app I got recently is iEasyCamera, which addresses another problem with the iPhone’s built-in camera software: the small “take photo” button. It’s hard enough to take regular photos, making sure you’re tapping the tiny button right. But what about when you want to take a self-portrait, or take an image of you and your sweetie together without asking a total stranger? Not having any screen real estate on the same side of the phone as the camera already makes framing a hit-and-miss proposition, but touching the “take photo” button blind? Almost impossible.

This app makes it so that touching the screen anywhere triggers the camera, meaning you don’t have to guess where the button is anymore. Not a perfect fix–framing is still a problem–but the worst difficulty is nicely eliminated.

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This isn’t a camera-related app, but I like it enough to want to tack it on somewhere. I like those Risk games, but it’s nearly impossible to find good ones for free (even the paid versions are usually not very good). I had one for a while, but it was a pre-OS X app, and is no longer playable on my Intel Macs. But there’s a decent one for the iPhone for free: Lux Touch.

The good points: it’s easy to use and doesn’t get in your way by trying to fancy things up–it’s a straight, old-fashioned Risk game. The down side: you can’t set up the game. There are always five players, you are always blue, you always go last, and the countries you start with and the initial allocation of troops is random and usually not at all what you want. Sometimes, I have had troubles with tap-commands going non-stop, in that I tap and release, but the app continues to act as if I were holding the tap. You wind up with all your troops in one place that way… but it doesn’t happen too often.

Anyway, a few good apps there.

Just found a great new iPhone App web site via LifeHacker. AppShopper does something I have wanted for some time: shows me apps sorted the way I want them. The App Store from Apple is severely limited in the way it allows you to search for apps. You can search by name or keyword, by category, and a few other ways, but if you want to concentrate on free apps only, then your choices are limited–all you’ve got is the “top” apps list. Otherwise, you have to sort through long lists mostly populated by paid apps.

App Shopper let’s you look for paid, free, or all apps, limiting the search by category, new or old, and shows updates & price changes. A very handy way to find exactly what you’re looking for. Now you can be presented with a list of free productivity apps, for example, without having to also track what’s free and what’s not. And it’s a good way to see daily what new free apps have been released.

When you find something you might be interested in, you can see the whole description with screen shots right there on the web page, without having to go to iTunes. But when you’re ready to download it, there’s a link which will open the app’s page directly in iTunes for an easy download.

This just made my “visit daily” list.

Well, this was an unexpected but nice surprise. Google Japan has just added the Directions feature to their maps service, something that was missing until now. I found out when someone posted that Directions now works for their iPhone on the iPhone in Japan forum.

On the web version (shown above), you can choose to find directions by car or by train. By car, you can exclude toll roads and/or give preference to “normal” roads; the results display with an option to see the Street View to get an idea of what each turning point looks like. Missing feature: not being able to click on the map to define a starting/ending point (unless it’s there and I just missed it). By train, it works just like Yahoo! Transit, but better–as it not only shows the route on a map, but it’s all contained on one page, and seems to have more options. Very, very nice.

The iPhone version is nice as well, but with a major failing: there’s no option to exclude toll roads. This is a deal-killer for anyone like myself who has a vehicle that is not allowed on toll roads. It also makes no sense as often the toll roads are jammed and local roads serve better, not to mention that the tolls are expensive and you might prefer the regular roads in any case. Hopefully, there will be an upgrade to the Maps program at some point (soon?) in the future which adds this critical option. Who knows, it may come with the iPhone firmware update v. 2.2 coming soon–the update allows for Google Street View, which means that they’re changing the Google Maps app.

Nevertheless, this is a welcome step forward for Google Maps Japan, not very long after Street View became available here.

What’s still missing: traffic information.

As it turns out, the iPhone is going gangbusters. Despite a wash of analysis claiming that the iPhone is now irrelevant because there are other touch-screen smartphones out there, Apple maintains strong sales, and easily beat its own goal of selling 10 million units by the end of this year. This is one reason why:

Those are all my current apps–the ones I have present on the phone, at least, I have some more hibernating in iTunes.

Granted, I don’t use most of them–I use maybe a dozen of them daily, and maybe two or three times that number more than once a week. But there’s a hell of a lot there, lots of them features that the iPhone is supposed to lack–and a lot of them simply unavailable on any other mobile-phone platform.

And then there’s price–I paid for four of them, I think, for a grand total of eight dollars, if I recall correctly. The rest are free apps.

Here’s my main screen. “AroundMe” is one of those GPS-enabled business finders, this one working in Japan. But the big addition here is Fring, which brings Skype to the iPhone; I can now Skype my family in the U.S. from anywhere I am in Japan.

The games screen is almost always the one my phone rests on, however. Sol Free is a fantastic free Klondike game (Sachi has become addicted to it as much as I have); Morocco (Othello/Reversi) gets lots of play, too. But new additions are Joker’s Wild (a fairly good slot machine app) and Lux Touch, a Risk! game. Lux doesn’t have the easiest interface, but it does what it advertises. Koi Pond, a recent paid purchase, is also getting a lot of use, though it’s best as a show-off app.

MPG is one of those apps I paid for also; it allows you to track your gas mileage. I’m still trying to figure out which of the Unit Converters I like best. WordPress works as it did last time I reported, but I have yet to try out LifeCast, which could supplant it. But the big new app on this screen is Pointer, a Mac-based WiFi PowerPoint/Keynote controller you can get for a dollar.

To run Pointer, you need to download a small free app from the company’s web site, and it must be run when you use the iPhone app. You also have to join a WiFi network with your computer and the iPhone on it; if no WiFi network exists, you can create one using your Mac laptop, then set your iPhone to join it. Once you do all that (a quick run-through once you’ve done it once or twice), Pointer will look for and find your computer.

Once you connect, the iPhone’s touch screen becomes a wireless mouse, and can switch between the regular cursor and a faux laser-pointer light splash. It won’t activate the Dock, but it can be used for anything clickable.

Beyond that, you have to set the app for PowerPoint or Keynote, and then use one of two control sets to run your slide show:

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I tried it out, and it worked beautifully. I’ve been waiting for an app like this for a while.

And this is one reason the iPhone is so successful–endless expandability. New apps come out by the dozen per day, with an almost-as-rich stream of free apps. Just recently, two pretty good golf games and a nice billiards game came out, all free. Some are demos, some have ads, but they’re pretty nice and eminently playable.

In order to support paid apps better, Apple recently took down their Free Apps link, and now your ability to view new free apps via iTunes is somewhat limited. But someone is always working on stuff like this, and sure enough, there are feed sites which you can subscribe to which tell you about all the new free apps that come out every day. I use this one, and have it collect listings in my Mail app.

But I have to admit, the interface is still what draws most people. My students continue to Ooh and Ahh whenever they see it, as do other people.

If you use your iPhone in Japan and have used the Ekitan app, you may have noticed that they have pulled out the rug from under you: they are no longer a free service. If you try to use your free version, they let you input stations and times like before, but when you attempt a search, you get a message telling you that “the service has terminated” (サービス終了しました。). When you dismiss the message, you are taken to a web page explaining that the app is now being charged for and you must re-download it from the App Store. The free version seems to still be available and can even be updated–but it won’t work. You gotta pay ¥350 for the working version.

Well, that might have been unfortunately necessary, except that now there’s an alternative: Yahoo Transit, available from the Japanese iTunes Store, for free. What’s more is that the Yahoo app is a lot better–I would have switched anyway, had I known about it. All the more mysterious that Ekitan should suddenly start charging for their app (unless they added new features themselves, but I don’t feel like going to the trouble of translating the whole description just to find out).

The Yahoo app has everything that Ekitan had, but includes some nice new extra features. One is the ability to use GPS to scan for nearby stations instead of typing them in, an excellent time-saver (and even a good way to locate nearby stations you may not have been aware of). The top field (greyed out) is where you tap to enter a station name; the second field is where you tap to get a list of local stations. (The third multi-line field is the list of stations you searched previously.)

Unlike Ekitan, where you have to navigate a Hiragana menu to find your station name, you can just type in your station name directly–a much easier way, most times. Another nice point is the ability to type in names in English and have them resolve into Japanese, just like on the Yahoo Transit web site.

Of course, if there are several stations with the same name or partial name, you can choose from the list:

Like Ekitan, Yahoo Transit remembers stations that you searched for before, so as to maintain a handy quick-find list of often-used stations. Unlike Ekitan, Yahoo’s app allows you to erase station names you don’t want to keep–a very nice addition.

And finally, the app allows you to search additional transportation services, including domestic airline and expressway bus lines–good for long-distance travel. Also, you can turn any one of these off.

And then, of course, you get the results, with all the needed info.

Like I said, a very nice app. I’m kind glad Ekitan shut me out, now I have a much nicer alternative.

According to MacRumors, emoji support is coming to the iPhone in v. 2.2:

Hard to believe that some people would look at the iPhone and say, “yeah, it’s got massive expandability with cheap and free software in addition to being an all-in-one cell phone, iPod, email, (best portable) web browser, calendar & contacts, GPS with Google-maps integration, etc. device…. but I don’t want to get it because I can’t insert cute cartoon images of puppies in my text messages!”

And yet.

Still, the iPhone has a big “Wow!” factor here; even months after its release, whenever students in my school see me using it, they “ohh” and “ahh” and are delighted when I let them play with it-and are still blown away when I show them the search feature on the maps app.

Something I got to test out when back in the U.S.: how much the iPhone’s 3G feature eats up battery time. The answer: lots.

Since global roaming would cost way too much (about $2 per minute, even to receive calls), I made sure that Sachi and I could not even accidentally use the feature while we were abroad recently. To do this, you just have to go into the Settings and turn “Airplane Mode” on, then go back into WiFi and turn it back on again; this disables the phone feature and nothing else.

Usually, my iPhone drains the battery within a single day; even moderate usage can leave me dry before I get home. To prevent this, I often bring my charging cable with me.

While in the U.S., with only 3G turned off, the iPhone would last up to 3 days without a recharge–quite a substantial difference. That was even with WiFi active and in use whenever we were at home. So Steve Job was not kidding about needing a more efficient chipset to make the 3G worthwhile–the full-face touch screen, WiFi, and constant usage don’t use up the phone’s charge like that one feature does.

Sachi and I both now suffer from sore butts, but we had a very nice day. We got to have our bike ride from Ikebukuro to Shakuji Park, planned for last weekend but canceled due to bad weather. And today turned out to be a perfect day for it; sunny, but not too much; hot at first, but with good breezes, and halfway to the park, the temperature dropped to a much more comfortable level. And we needed that: the ride, one way, was 8.4 miles (13.5 km), or over sixteen and a half miles (27 km), equivalent of riding a bicycle from Shinjuku to Tachikawa, or (in San Francisco terms) from Stanford University to SFO.

It was also a perfect example of the iPhone to the rescue. Without it, I would have had to lug around a giant map book, or at least make copies of the relevant pages, fishing them out of my pockets and unfolding and refolding them, trying to figure out what sheet was which. The iPhone and its GPS worked great to guide us there and back, allowing us to take the optimal route but change our path if we wanted to. I could easily just pull it out of my shirt pocket and turn it on with one hand, checking our route to make sure we stayed on the right roads.

But the iPhone really came to the rescue when we realized that Sachi’s tire was deflating again and again. She had not used her bike in almost a year, and the tires were flat, naturally we thought. So we pumped up at a gas station–but 10 minutes into our trip, they were deflated again. So we pumped up again at another gas station–but again, they started deflating. This would have been a big thing normally–we probably would have had to cancel the trip and head back. But the iPhone’s Map app showed us the nearest bicycle shop just a few hundred meters away–which we never would have found otherwise–and a few minutes and 700 yen later, Sachi’s bike was fixed, and we were on our way again. The little gadget is very much earning its keep.

The ride one-way took an hour on the way back, though a bit longer on the way in due to the bike issues. But we got to the park just fine, and I got treated to some very nice birdwatching. No new species or anything, but some nice birding nonetheless. The first event was the best, a family of Common Moorhens. At first, it was just the one bird, or so I thought at the time, and with such a lovely bird, that would have been good enough. (Some of the following images enlarge to 1200 x 800 versions on click.)

But then the Moorhen pushed out into the water and started doing something strange: it circled around and started making repeated calls. We didn’t understand why until a minute later, when we noticed a little fuzzball emerge from the reeds:

Still not completely covered with feathers (though its beak showed the distinctive red-and-yellow Moorhen trademark) and eyes looking like they were only recently opened, a tiny Moorhen chick tentatively waded out, but only so far.

Mama had to come in and encourage the little fellow. And then another chick came ambling out:

The hen then led the chicks out into the water for a little swim, followed by sunbathing (or whatever) on stumps a little farther out. But that wasn’t all of the Moorhen family; apparently, last season’s chicks had grown up, and were still milling around. What’s interesting is that these birds lose their red-and-yellow bill colors, but only in their “teenager” phase–then they get those colors back when they mature.

Soon after that, we were chasing some Little Grebes…

…when Sachi just happened to spot a Kingfisher nearby.

For a public park, there were a good many interesting birds to be found. We also spotted the usual crows, sparrows, and Spot-billed ducks, in addition to a Little Egret and a Grey Heron. So, not bad birdwatching for a non-birdwatching venue.

But birds were not all that were there; some domestic animals also came into view.

But the real pleasure of the day came when we spotted a couple with a little Shiba Inu puppy. Now, Sachi just loves Shiba Inus, can’t get enough of ’em (she’s always tuning into YouTube on her iPhone to check out the latest Shiba puppy videos), and puppies are the best of all. Whenever we see a Shiba when we are out and about, we consider it a good result for the day. So when we passed the seated couple with the puppy, I just had to ask if Sachi could pet it–she was too shy to ask herself.

(The string is intended to train the pup not to bark too much, so we were told.)

Well, Sachi got a bonus–not only did they let us pet the puppy, but she got to hold it, too. Her idea of heaven.

So, it was a good day.

A lot of it is explained here, but the short story is that the iPhone has had a successful launch here, allowing 3rd-place SoftBank to grab the lion’s share of new activations this quarter in Japan, many of them stolen from other carriers.

I’ve observed this on a small scale at my school, where students have invariably reacted to the iPhone with intense interest, many asking to see it because they’d heard that I got one, and more than a few saying they planned to buy one. This from a population which is made up almost completely of DoCoMo and Au (KDDi) users–I know because I asked two of my classes, nearly 30 students, and not a single one had a SoftBank account. But now several are planning to change, once they can find a store that has iPhones in stock.

All this despite no handstrap, no emoji (color graphic emoticons), so electronic wallet, and (as yet) no QR Code reader. Go figure.

Something which has long been suspected among some vendors on the Internet is faked good reviews of an item. When something is sold on a site which allows customer reviews, what is to keep the seller from using varying IP addresses and user accounts to create a herd of sock puppets to give glowing, rave reviews of a product? The answer is, nothing. And the problem is that it is very difficult to find out if this has happened, as tracks can be covered pretty well and most people would not deem such an offense worthy of a detailed, difficult investigation. Even so, fake reviews are sometimes caught.

Right now, I am wondering if I wasn’t the victim of fake reviews for an iPhone app. After downloading only free apps for several weeks, I started buying a few cheap paid apps. The first was a good purchase–something called “Mileage Tracker,” an app which allows you to track what mileage your vehicle is getting by inputting odometer readings and information about each gas purchase.

But the second app I bought was a Japanese language study aid, a kanji flash card program called “Kanji Flip.” Priced at what I believed was a reasonable $3, it promised to drill me on kanji based on JLPT levels, keeping track of wrong answers and working me out on those more than other cards. As usual, I checked out the reviews, and they were all glowing–and maybe that should have tipped me off, as almost no app gets purely good reviews. Anyway, I bought it, and quickly discovered that I had bought a dog of an app.

First, let me spell out what’s wrong with the app; if you don’t need to know this, then skip the next five paragraphs.

The problem that immediately stands out is that the data is incomplete. Several flash cards have missing or incomplete Japanese readings (pronunciations) of the kanji. There are only 2230 cards in the set, it would have taken the author only short time to check for blanks, maybe an hour or two to check for missed data. See below just a half dozen examples of botched cards out of more than a dozen I found after reviewing only a few hundred cards–which means well over a hundred cards are seriously flawed, about 5%.

Furthermore, the app is totally non-configurable–in any flash card set, you want to have some control, some manner of setting aside unwanted cards or being tested in some way; this app has none of that. In fact, the only “feature”–marking your guesses right or wrong–is user-driven, not part of the app itself. It doesn’t test you, it asks you to test yourself.

Then there’s the mixing of the levels. You would think that the author, having categorized the kanji by their JLPT levels, would have kept them separate–but no, when you choose a higher level, it includes flash cards from all the lower levels–there is no way to keep out the easy cards.

But what is worst about the app is the repeats: as you continue using the app, it starts sending you more and more repeats of the same cards. I just tested this by trying out level 3, which has 986 cards. The first seventeen cards were unique–but then it tossed me three repeats from the first seventeen. Then, after three new cards, it gave me eleven repeats in a row. Then I got six new cards and eight repeats. Out of the fifty or so cards I tried, nearly half were repeats, and a couple were given three times. With nearly a thousand cards in the level, it would have taken far longer than it should have to get through the entire set.

Even worse, many of the cards which were repeated were ones I had tagged as having scored correctly on–in fact, the last four I tried were all previous “correct” cards. The author says that he gives you some “easy” cards to “encourage” you, but swamping you with cards you have already mastered is aggravating, not encouraging. But the only useful feature of this app is the claimed ability to track wrong guesses and give them back to you later. These two features cancel each other out; the author could easily have included no wrong answer tagging and disguised it with the “easy” card “encouragement”–there was no way to distinguish these two features at work from simply random card repeats.

Okay, so the app is a dog–so why all the rave reviews? It’s rare for an app to get more than four stars on the App Store, especially one with so many problems and limitations. Then I noticed that a lot of the reviewers gave simple, one- or two-sentence reviews, and had no history of other reviews–and a few actually gave only one or two other reviews, those being negative reviews of competing apps. Wanting to warn off people who might be getting the wrong idea, I wrote my own review.

Then I noticed something else happening: you can also rate reviews as being helpful or not helpful. Suddenly, most of the rave reviews, including some of the simplistic ones, started getting only “helpful” ratings–and my review suddenly got a whole bunch of “not helpful” reviews. And one five-star commenter actually edited their review to include a criticism of my review.

Like I said, there’s no way to check, but it all comes across as being very fishy. Still, all I lost was $3, and it re-taught me a good lesson: don’t always believe the customer reviews for a product, especially if they’re unusually glowing.

There’s been quite a bit of talk out there about a new iPhone app called NetShare (iTunes Store link). The app allows you to use your iPhone as WiFi base station, “tethering” your Mac to the iPhone and using its 3G Internet connection. In essence, you can connect your Mac to the ‘net wherever you can get a 3G signal; your iPhone becomes a cellular modem.

This app is controversial because the mobile carriers obviously don’t want you to use it. There are Internet apps on your computer, like torrent downloading, voice and video chat apps, and other high-bandwidth programs that could seriously strain their broadband services. Some believe that AT&T’s contract forbids the use of such an app, which is the reason many believed Apple took it down from the App Store yesterday–except that now the app is back up.

Interestingly, NetShare is listed on the Japanese App Store, but when I try to see the app’s details, I get a message saying it’s not currently available; if I click on the “Buy App” button, I get prompted to enter my password, and because I don’t really want to buy it (I don’t really need to, and it’s ¥1200), I can’t see if the purchase would actually go through (I am guessing not).

But if you have access to the U.S. App Store, if you could really use this app, and you are willing to risk the wrath of your carrier for over-using the supposedly unlimited data plan you paid for, then you should buy it before Apple changes its mind again and takes it off the market.

Update: Too late, it’s off again. Any bets as to whether it’ll come back?

There are a lot of free apps hitting the iPhone and iPod Touch App Store which help you keep data–to do lists, reminders, voice notes, etc. However, they have an interesting twist: instead of simply being apps which keep the data on your device, they require you to sign up for an account with the maker. Now, perhaps in some cases, like the voice transcription services in “Jott”, there is a need to do this–the CPU on the iPhone might be too taxed, and/or the memory not big enough to hold the software. But in most cases, there is simply no need for transmitting the data–your iPhone can keep and store voice memos without sending them to some corporate server, and certainly this is true with text and schedule notes. But services like “Reqall” and “Zenbe Lists,” both recent additions, join a list of other apps which require you to sign up for a service which is unnecessary for the task the app does. There is probably no reason to believe that these people want to peep in on your private life, but I would have a concern that they’re trying to get my marketing data.

It seems to work just fine; the last three posts were made using the iPhone. You can easily sign in to your blog, get the last x-number of posts (default is 30), edit posts, and make new ones. When you make a new one, you enter the title, decide a category and tags, and then tap out the post. You add pictures from the library or by snapping a photo on the spot, adding as many photos as you like.

Down points: typing in HTML commands is laborious because of all the special characters, like angled brackets; however, you can type those in first, then add the text part using the loupe tool.

Photo preview leaves something to be desired; you can’t pinch or rotate to see the whole image before posting it, you only get a general idea unless the image is naturally in portrait mode, and even then you can’t zoom for detail from within the app. Not can you crop the image, which is a big problem as the iPhone camera doesn’t zoom.

When you add photos, you can’t place them where you want them–they get tacked on to the end of the post. This can be worked around by posting the images first, then editing the post (which has the HTML for the images), placing text around the images. When editing, you can add more photos (only to the new end of the post).

The images are of a pre-set size, 300 pixels wide in landscape mode. The workaround: the actual image is 640 x 480, and you can post-edit to change the image size relatively easily.

You also have to have your images placed in the default location–I had mine place in a special location, and the images did not appear in my first tests.

All of these are relatively minor nits, and as stated, most have relatively easy workarounds. As you could see from the most recent post before this one, I was able to liveblog pretty handily, and it worked just fine. This is also version-1 software, so there are bound to be several rough spots. So overall, I would say this is pretty nice software, and I’ll use it fairly often. Expect me to blog on the road a lot more from now on.

Future feature needs: a menu to insert HTML commands, better image management (cropping and choice of image size would be big improvements), and access to comments.