I haven’t downloaded and tried out everything, but I have had a fair sampling, and these are some of my impressions:

Ekitan (Japan only) is a great train app, like Yahoo Transit: give the name of train stations (helpfully, it remembers the stations you’ve entered, though you can’t delete stations you don’t need anymore) you are going to and from, and it tells you the times, transfers, and costs to get there. I can’t remember how many times I wanted to access this on the fly after having left home, it’s a great app to have in Japan, perfect for the mobile phone.

Just two caveats: one, it’s Japanese-only, at least for now; I am sure an English version will come out soon (though you can look up names easily if you know hiragana); and two, it does not know current transit data. When I used it yesterday, it gave me the correct published data–except there was an accident on one line that affected the others I needed to take, and so it proved a little useless except for making me aware of the potential routes and costs–which was still pretty nice to know. (Late note: I can’t seem to find Ekitan on the App Store, either Japan or U.S.–it seems to have been pulled down for some reason! Copyright infringement?)

There are some nice games available; one is Morocco, a Reversi/Othello game. Simple, but well-executed. Similarly well-done is the more directly-named Othello, with a different theme but is nevertheless the same game.

Even better in some ways is Moonlight Mahjong Lite; for those of you who like Shanghai, the game where you remove mahjong tiles which match from the edges of a stacked pile, this is a pretty good one, especially for the free price. It allows you to freely resize the tile pile and re-orient to different 3-D angles–very nicely done! One nit: the small size of the screen makes it hard to hit the right tile sometimes, and the way the game is set up, a previously chosen tile automatically de-selects if you don’t hit the second tile spot-on. Which means you have to make two difficult selections in a row in order for it to work. Hopefully, in a future update, they’ll make it so that a mis-selection will not de-select the first tile. Other than that, this is an incredibly nice game.

A company called “Jirbo” has released a bunch of little games, including a nice little “Concentration” style game called “Jirbo Match.” Can keep you occupied for a bit; I’ll have to check out their other free stuff.

Among fun-for-a-while gag games: PhoneSaber, which turns your iPhone into a buzzing and clashing lightsaber; Alarm Free, which is nothing but a fire-alarm-style lamp which flashes and buzzes if the iPhone is shaken, dropped, or jostled; iPint, which gives you a fun little beer-sliding-down-the-counter game before the great gag of “pouring” you a “beer” which you can then “drink” to the delight of onlookers; and Rotary Dialer, which gives you an old-fashioned interface for calling someone–giving the word “dial a number” back it’s true meaning, although it lacks the essential clicking noise for some reason.

Midomi is a cool app which allows you to find music by humming, speaking the title, or holding the iPhone up to a radio or TV which is playing the music. Frankly, I was very surprised at how good it was, especially with hummed or (badly!) sung music; I was just as surprised when it failed half the time to identify music played directly from my iTunes library. For example, I tried to get it to recognize Weird Al’s “Don’t Download This Song,” and after repeated attempts it failed–but then I sang the chorus myself, and it instantly recognized the song. After finding the music (orchestral music also recognized), you can then either jump to YouTube videos featuring the music, or go to the iTunes Store and buy it. Way cool.

One of the most annoying things about certain “free” apps is the hidden application process that you don’t find out about until you get to the point of actually using the app. Many of these require services which demand you start an account, and some go beyond the simple send-us-and-verify-your-email-so-we-can-spam-you-to-death process. I just tried to download something called “Jott” which sounded promising: speak into your iPhone and it’ll transcribe your voice into text notes. Cool! So I download it, and it requires an account (why, if all it does is transcribe?). The fields cannot be filled in the iPhone app, so I go online. Just give us your email address! And your phone number! And your ZIP code! None of this is for spam marketing, trust us, even though it has nothing whatsoever to do with the service we’re claiming to sell you! Never mind that small print which says we share your data with 3rd parties and send you “relevant” advertising! Read our privacy policy, which swears we’ll keep your information private–just between us, you, and the spammers, we promise!

But then it goes further–after going through the whole validate-your-email garbage, it then requires you to call them up. Undoubtedly so they can verify that the phone number you gave them (US numbers only allowed) is real. And we promise you it’s nothing to do with spamming you by phone either!

What a crock. I am so glad that I gave them fake data, having figured out the scam afterwards.

Another speech-oriented app, however, is a much better deal: SpeechCloud Voice Dialer. This app allows you to hold down a button and speak a name; it then finds the name in your phone book and allows you to call it. It’s a cool app, except for one thing: it doesn’t really save you time. By the time I have held down the button, spoken the name, and waited for the recognition to work, I probably could have found the name just as quickly in the Contacts list. So this one is more for the fun factor than it is for actual productivity, unless (a) you hate finding contacts in the standard list, or (b) you have so many contacts that just finding one specific name is too time-consuming.

You should also be cautious of apps which cost money but which have a free counterpart. iBeer, for example, seems to be just like iPint, except that (a) it lacks the slide-the-beer-down-the-bar game, and (2) it costs $3. How lame is that? And yet, there are people who are claiming that it’s better because the foam and bubbles seem more “natural.” Bah. iPint works just fine. But if you want to pay $3 to see more realistic bubbles, then buy an actual beer–and you’ll still have enough money left over to buy me one, too.

Apps I’ve tried which did not impress me: Banner Free, like most apps I have eventually trashed, is fun for about half a minute, then you grow tired of it. Lots of stuff like that in the Free section. Bubble Wrap is not even as fun as it sounds. Plus, it seemed to play inconsistently. Spinner struck me as a game too hard and uninteresting to bother with.

And then, some seem just completely useless. Why have an app that spells out numbers longhand, especially if you can’t even copy and paste the result? Are there really people who don’t know how to spell numbers? Hell, even Flashlight–essentially just a white screen–is at least more useful. Another example of an inanely pointless app is “Yes|No,” which does exactly what the title implies, and no more. It is not even a Magic 8-Ball.

More reviews to come, for certain.

I thought I might try to compile a list of nice iPhone tricks, ones that many people might not be aware of.

Surprisingly, a lot of the best and most productive tips are not really spelled out too well for most people. Many of these are almost automatic with the predictive correction, but you should be aware of them to make the best use of them.

• When people say “trust the iPhone’s keyboard,” they mean that you should not concern yourself with the typos that you are aware you are making, nor should you be constantly checking what you typed for mistakes. There is an urge born of habit which makes you stop typing and want to backtrack once you realize you made a error; the iPhone’s corrective typing makes this unnecessary almost all of the time. For example, I tried to type “mysterious” using the iPhone keypad, and instead typed “musteripua.” After typing that initual “u” instead of the “y” I had the urge to go back and retype it. Instead, I plodded on and made more errors–but when I finished, the iPhone was ready to swap my abomination of typing with the word I wanted–“mysterious.” So don’t constantly fret over typos, just barge on forward, and the few mistakes you do make can easily be corrected later on review; do things this way and you’ll be typing a lot faster. It also allows you to do broad-surface thumb typing.

• Be mindful of the predictive correction’s interface–you may have the urge to tap the correct spelling which pops up under the word you’re typing. Don’t do it–tapping the correction will make it go away. To accept a correction, just hit “space.” If a correction pops up before you’re finished typing, hit the space bar early, and it’ll pop into place.

• Don’t worry about capitalizing the names of days, months, the pronoun “I” or the first word in a sentence–these happen automatically. Auto capitalization sometimes happens with proper nouns, but that is spotty at best, and works bet with names you use often.

• Don’t try to type apostrophes, these are almost always added in automatically.

• When ending a sentence with a period, just tap the space bar twice; it’ll type a period and a space for you.

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But here are some keyboard tricks you might not have known about:

• Instead of tapping the “123” button, typing punctuation, and then typing either the “ABC” or the “space” bar to get back to letters again, just do a swipe. Start with your finger on the “123” button, but don’t lift your finger; the keyboard will change. Then drag your finger to the right button; the pop-up key tab for the button will show. Then let go. The punctuation you wanted will appear, and you’ll be popped right back into the letter keyboard again. With practice, this can be a fast swiping move.

• When typing a URL, you can see the “.com” button at the bottom of the screen. Hold it down, and “.net”, “.edu”, and “.org” will also be available. The same is available in Mail when you hold down the “.” (period) button.

• To get extra characters, you should activate the Japanese “Kana” keyboard. Go to the Settings app, tap on “General,” then “Keyboard,” then “International Keyboards”; scroll down to “Japanese” and tap on it, then switch “Kana” on. Next, when you are typing, tap the ‘globe’ key, and cycle through your keyboards until you get to the Kana keyboard; it should look like a telephone keypad, except with Japanese hiragana character on it. On the left, tap the “ABC” button, then tap the same button again (it should now say “[star]123”. Note the special symbols under each number. Tap any number key more than once to get the special symbols; wait after you tap for a submenu to appear with alternate symbols.

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Here are some general iPhone tricks you may not have known about:

• Holding down the Home button for about 6 seconds will force-quit an app.

• Holding down the Home and Sleep/Wake button for about 10 seconds will force-shut down your iPhone.

• Quickly pressing the Home and Sleep buttons together will take a screen grab of what’s currently showing on your iPhone and save it as a PNG file in your photos area, which you can then download to your computer.

• If you have credit cards with billing addresses in more than one country, you can download apps and music from the iTunes Store (which contains the App Store) in different locales. I have cards in the U.S. and in Japan, so I can access both countries’ stores. This functionality can extend to the iPhone, but you can’t switch stores unless you do it through iTunes. To make your iPhone recognize a different iTunes Store, just set iTunes on your main computer to the right country, log in, then sync with your iPhone. The iPhone will switch to the country you set on your computer, and draw from that account.

• In the iPod, you may want to skip forward or back only a few seconds, something which is difficult if you use the slider bar at the top. But if you hold down on the “skip” buttons (the ones on either side of the play/pause button in the controls, which look like |<< and >>|) then it will skip forward slowly.

• Volume control takes getting used to. You may think that you turned the volume all the way up, but sometimes the volume settings change between different apps, like the iPod and the phone. In at least once case, I noticed that I could max the volume by both using the on-screen volume slider and the physical volume buttons o the side of the phone.

• Japan only: SMS info: on the White Plan, you get unlimited SMS messages, but due to Japan’s SMS system, SoftBank cannot exchange SMS with DoCoMo or Au phones. Go figure. This is not really a trick, but it is a tip of sorts.

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That’s all for now, but I’ll be back with more later, if and when I find them.

Today, I demo’ed the iPhone for my two sections of Introduction to Computers (the iPhone is, after all, a computer–that’s my excuse for showing off), and the students were appropriately wowed. I set up a routine to go over the major features one by one in about 20 minutes. There were a variety of gasps and ‘wow’s at various times, and for the most part, the reaction was very positive. They loved the map feature (it usually is the star attraction), and were appropriately impressed by the iPod music and video features, as well as the browsing and App Store features.

To wind up the presentation, I showed them a game which is mildly interesting to play, but great for showing off: iPint (iTunes link), a game where you use the iPhone’s accelerometer to guide a beer down a bar to the waiting hands of a drinker. When you get to the end, the iPhone simulates a mug of beer filling up, and the liquid sloshes when you turn the phone. Then you put the iPhone’s top edge to your lips and tilt it like you would a glass you are drinking from, and it gives the illusion of drinking beer out of the phone. A good finish, and the classes applauded enthusiastically.

Before each presentation, I wanted to find two SoftBank users in the class; I thought we’d try a three-way call and see the image-and-ringtone presentation when calling, and SoftBank users can call each other for free. SoftBank has some 20% of the Japanese market, so out of 30 students I expected five or six to have SoftBank–more, I thought, as many parents pay for the cell phones and they might want that family free-dialing plan SoftBank offers. So I asked… and got nothing. Most were DoCoMo users, most of the rest Au, and a few were Willcom. Not a single SoftBank user among the lot.

When I asked why, the response was pretty clear: for these students, SoftBank was too expensive. Not the monthly plan–SoftBank’s 980 yen White Plan is about as cheap as plans get–but the per call cost. If you go over your limits, the students told me, it costs 42 yen per minute to call using a SoftBank phone, but other providers have lower rates, such as 28 yen per minute. Or so I was told by these students. The White Plan also has no free minutes.

That works out fine for me, as I don’t do an incredible amount of calling, but it doesn’t work as well for these young kids, who make lots of calls. Still, the lack of a single SoftBank customer among the crowd very much surprised me. An overlooked market for SoftBank?

Addendum: I noticed that the Japanese iPhone commercials–by Apple, not SoftBank–have started showing. SoftBank still peppers the airwaves with their ads, but none for the iPhone.

It looks like I’m going to get Mobile Me in Japan. Two reasons: first, I’m in Japan. But second, in a reversal of usual policies, this particular Apple product is actually cheaper in Japan than it is in the U.S.

In the U.S., it’s $99. In Japan, it’s ¥9800. That $92.40 by current exchange rates (the U.S. price comes out to ¥10,540). I can only suppose this is due to the psychological effect of pricing just below the next added digit.

Which in itself brings up an interesting point: in American, stuff ends with a “9” in that sales technique–$99, or $0.99, or $9.99. In Japan, however, it’s very often “800”–¥4,800, or ¥9,800, for example. Interesting. Why is that?

Update: Don’t know why, but the plan is priced even lower–¥9333 ($87.70)–inside the Mobile Me account under my “Account Options” (see below). Though, I could swear I heard of a $60 deal for the first year if you got it with your iPhone. Is that only if I buy the iPhone directly from Apple? I’ll have to check on that…

Something’s not right here, that’s for sure. Piper Jaffray in the U.S. has estimated that over the weekend, no more than 9,000 iPhones were sold in all of Japan.

However, it is pretty well established that there were more than 1000 people in line for the iPhone on the first day in Omate Sando; that Bic Camera and Yodobashi Camera each had 1,000 units, and both sold out. Right there we’re talking about more than three thousand iPhones.

Then there were roughly 2,700 SoftBank stores around the country selling iPhones. I know the one I went to–one of at least half a dozen in Ikebukuro, not even a very big shop–had at least 70 iPhones, as that was where I was in “line” and they probably sold more than that. But somehow, those 2,700 shops only sold three iPhones apiece between them? Somehow that doesn’t quite add up right.

We’ll have to wait for some slightly more official sales figures to come out, it looks like.

Update: As I thought: Apple has released the official numbers, and they did sell a million iPhones as was intended, not the 425,000 the analysts projected.

I’ve had a bit more time to play around with the iPhone, and I have both positive and negative impressions to report. Overall, the impressions are positive, because I very much like this little machine–even though I am still in the process of getting set up and used to stuff. I just need more time to enjoy it fully, is all. I’d start taking the train as a way of having time to watch videos and stuff, except that where I’m located, the train trip wouldn’t take long enough! It’s also a temptation to use it more often, to make calls and get calls.

The negatives: missing features. Why haven’t they implemented copy and paste? That makes no sense. Another huge time-saver would be to implement (or allow a third-party hack for) auto text replacement–like “AutoCorrect” in MS Word, you type in a code and is automatically swaps it with a longer text string. I know I would use that quite a bit. You could, essentially, create your own shorthand and type stuff a lot faster and easier.

And when I come to think of it, where’s the universal landscape keyboard that everybody has been clamoring for since the iPhone first came out? There are universal keyboards in some apps (Safari being the most commonly used), but most other places, you have to deal with the narrow keys.

The Email app is perhaps the most troublesome in terms of missing features. You cannot mark multiple emails or all email in a mailbox as “read”; instead, you have to view each message before it will disappear from the number count. As mentioned before, the lack of a spam filter is pretty huge, and not being able to turn off inline images is downright reckless. Not being able to selectively disable incoming/outgoing mail is a bit disappointing as well.

For another setting: what use is the wallpaper if you only see if for two seconds as the phone starts up?

Also frustrating is what Apple has done with its site: they have shot down the Search feature in the discussion area, which renders the site mostly useless, instead of being a gold mine for solutions. What the hell are they thinking?

Okay, so it’s building to a fair list of annoyances–but they are mostly minor stuff, or stuff I can learn to live with okay. Nothing’s gonna be perfect, especially at version 2.0.

In the “good stuff” category: in the Settings “control panel” area, there are some useful settings to know about. The “Fetch New Data” setting allows you to switch the phone from getting your email only when you enter an account in the Mail app, to checking your email every 15, 30, or 60 minutes, in case you’d rather see alerts for new messages pop up on their own. You can set a Fetch time but still set individual accounts to manual, all in the name of saving battery life.

Under “Sounds,” you can set ringtones and alerts for various situations. Try turning the Brightness up all the way–it’s pretty impressive. Well, indoors, at least. Under “General,” you can track usage–how many minutes of calls, how many data packets and MB transmitted–important if you don’t have unlimited plans; you can change Network settings to disable 3G and data downloads (if you’re overseas).

Features you may not have known about: double-clicking the Home button can take you to Phone Favorites or the iPod controls (you can set that under Settings/General/Home Button). Holding down the Home button and the Sleep/Wake button at the same time will take a screen shot of your iPhone and save it to your Photos area. When typing, double-tapping the space bar will type a period and a space.

You can force-quit a program by holding the Home button down for six seconds, or reset the whole iPhone (if it completely freezes) by holding down the Home and Sleep/Wake buttons for eight seconds. I found the force-quit useful this morning, as my Mail app seemed to be stuck checking mail–the progress ring just kept rotating and wouldn’t stop. Force-quit, open it again, and it works. I guess one thing to get used to is that this is a computer OS, and not a rigidly set cell phone directory, so you have to deal with stuff like app hanging from time to time.

A nice hack: you can avoid paying through the nose to use music you’ve already bought as a ringtone. (This hack is for Mac users.)

If you got the music from the iTunes Store, you must burn it to a CD and then rip it back into iTunes to strip the DRM. If it’s not DRM’d (say, ripped from a music CD), then you can use it freely without the burn/rip hack.

Just open Garage Band, create a new project (give it the name you want the RingTone to bear), Command-Delete the default track (usually a Grand Piano), and drop the music file icon into the track area. When you are ready, go to the “Share” menu and choose “Send Ringtone to iTunes.” You will probably be prompted to edit your file at this point; ringtones can only be up to 40 seconds long. When you agree to edit, you’ll notice an orange bar above the sound track. Adjust it so it covers the area you want to have as the ringtone. Then send the ringtone to iTunes again, and this time it should work. The file will appear in iTunes, and the next time you sync ringtones, they will be uploaded and available.

Another thing I discovered: You can set up your SoftBank email account on your computer as well as on the iPhone. Sachi wanted to use her SoftBank account to do most of her communicating with friends (I think more because she’s used to the idea of doing that than an actual preference for the keitai’s email), but she doesn’t like the iPhone’s text input (she won’t trust the corrective typing yet, nor is she used to use the broad part of her thumb to type, so she’s sticking with the old-style keypad input). So I just set up her SoftBank mail account on her MacBook. You have to get the settings right (copy what’s in the iPhone), but when you do, it works like any other email account.

Reader’s Digest version: it’s a nice phone.

Slightly longer summarized version: though the setup process is rather difficult, once in use it works like a charm.

Now for the hoary details. Images will have to wait for when I have time.

Form: I like the way it feels. Not the way it smudges, but the shape conforms to the hand just about right. It’s clearly not designed optimally for one-handed use; it’s too wide for the thumb to reach across. It’s obviously supposed to be a two-handed tool, at least most of the time. One Japanese keyboard layout does compromise, simulating the keypad experience, but mostly you need to have both hands free in order to get maximum use from it. The casing is smooth but not too slick, although that just may be my own hands and how they do friction-wise; but I do not fear this slipping out of my hands (though perhaps only experience will tell).

Basic Use: Once you get used to the variations of the Home button and the Sleep/Wake button, it’s pretty easy to turn on and off in ways appropriate for the situation. the wall paper is nice, but if it is only visible between turning on the phone and unlocking it, then it’s a bit fleeting. The buttons are just right, of course, and the multi-page Home screen is spacious enough for the time being. To rearrange your icons, just hold one down for a few seconds till they all wiggle (cute), then drag and drop to suit. Pull an icon to the edge of the screen to pull it to another page. Items that can be deleted grow a circle with an “x” at top left, familiar to anyone who uses widgets in Dashboard. Hit the Home button to settle them again. To move between pages, swipe the initial Home page right to left. (The pages do not loop.)

When using any app, you can quit by clicking the Home button, which takes you back to the Home screen. If you return to the app you left, it’ll start up where you left off.

Speed: I’ll have to find a web site based in Japan which tests for speed; a U.S. site netted dubious results. But I have few complaints. It’s slower than a full-fledged computer, naturally, but otherwise it works just fine. Web pages do not take unduly long to fill in (usually), and the maps work pretty well too. One gripe: I don’t know if this is just my phone, but I am getting regular keyboard freezes. Not fatal ones, and it’s just when I begin typing sometimes. What I type will suddenly stop and stay frozen, and nothing will move the action on the screen–but the iPhone will save the action you do while it’s frozen, and so all of those button clicks and taps and swipes will play out rapidly, and often destructively, when the keyboard jumps back into life. We’ll have to see about that. (A bug for the next firmware upgrade to solve?)

The Phone: Haven’t had much chance to use it. Seems to work OK. More on that later.

Email: SoftBank dropped the ball here, giving poor instructions for their service. GMail works fine, and I assume that Yahoo Mail, Exchange, and Mobile Me do as well. POP and IMAP I have had a few problems with, but they seem to work once you get the settings right–but there might be some frustration along those avenues. The most notable problem: there appears to be no junk mail/spam filter. While GMail seems to pre-emptively filter, my POP accounts don’t, and the spam goes unchecked into my InBox. Annoying. Looks like I’ll have to figure out ways to filter things at that level.

Browsing: Works as advertised. Web pages are pretty easy to manage despite the small screen size. Tapping on a link takes you there; tapping on a text field opens the keyboard, and fields can be navigated with a handy set of “Previous” and “Next” buttons.

iPod: For some reason, I couldn’t get any sound to play at first, but that problem disappeared on its own, and all works smoothly now. Finally I have a video iPod. Sweet. Now I just have to get (a) the media on the phone, and (b) the time to enjoy it. Already I have Olbermann’s Countdown subscribed to, though Keith is on vacation this week.

The App Store: It works very well. I haven’t ventured into the paid territory yet, but so far the free stuff comes down fast and easy; installing software is a breeze. Getting it to work may be a different issue. So far, the Currency app and the NYTimes app both crash upon starting. What does work for me: AOL Radio (who needs an FM receiver?), an audio Mandarin Chinese phrasebook (Sachi likes it, wants me to get the Japanese version), And EkiTan, an app which figures out which trains your should take and when, like Yahoo Transit Japan.

Which brings me to another point: if you have credit cards with billing addresses in both Japan and the U.S., you can purchase apps from both stores. Sweet!

One useless but irresistibly cute app: PhoneSaber. Does the Star Wars lightsaber sound when you wave the phone around.

Touch Screen and Typing: I’d give it 9 out of 10 stars, but part of that is my prediction of how I’ll get better with it. Already I can type fast; I find the virtual keys are not that hard to hit, and when I “use the force” and let the predictive typing feature overcome my neurotic desire to catch and repair typos, I can go even faster. Though, as I mentioned before, the “o” key too often becomes a “p.”

Tapping and swiping work OK, swiping better than tapping. Some taps don’t register as well, and it definitely helps if you tape straight-on instead of at an angle, and more so if the phone is in your hand and not in someone else’s.

As mentioned earlier, Sachi is having a hard time with her long nails (Steve Jobs would have rethought the stylus idea had he grown nails like Sachi’s), but I think she has too little trust in how useful the broad flat pad of each finger can be utilized; she tends to go for the tip of the finger more, and often resorts to the edge of her pinky. She prefers the keypad input to the keyboard more for the broader keys than for the convenient typing style.

You can easily switch between international keyboards. I have U.S. English, QWERTY Japanese, keypad Japanese, and finger-drawn Chinese input methods active. Tapping the Globe button cycles through them.

It’s 4 a.m. and I have got to crash. More tomorrow. Sachi and I will be using our phones to help us navigate to a lunch spot to eat with an old friend of Sachi’s, so we’ll get more real-world use. I am tempted to buy some kind of handlebar-mounted stand so I can use the GPS–but that temptation is tempered by the fear of the iPhone falling off and crashing on the concrete.

Anyway, more later. If anyone has questions, please feel free. Again, sorry for not proofreading.

Yep, I finally got my hands on an iPhone. I should start by stating that this post is a narrative about getting and setting up the phone, and not a review of the features and usability; that’ll come in my next post.

As I reported a few days ago, SoftBank called me and cheerily arranged for an appointment. They seemed pretty open about when I could do it; they first suggested the 12th, but when I asked for the 11th, they agreed, and even happily changed the times as I became indecisive. As I had several months previously inadvertently scheduled a review class for my students just an hour after the official release date. No biggie; waiting another day would have annoyed me, but waiting a few more hours wouldn’t.

So I held the class and did final work at the office before heading home at about 3:15 pm. And on the way home, ran out of gas. Naturally. I had noticed it as I passed a gas station, but then thought, there’s a cheaper one just ahead, and my remaining gas spurts will take me there. Indeed they did, except for the small detail that the cheaper gas station had shut down, and the closest one after that was a half kilometer ahead–up a steep hill. Great.

By the time I got home, I did not have any time left to walk leisurely over to the SoftBank store, so I hopped on my bike and pedaled over–and therefore arrived nicely drenched in sweat. Fortunately, I had a hand fan and the shirt I was wearing didn’t show it badly. Sachi was waiting for me, and we walked in. In a few moments, we were taken to adjacent service counter stalls and waited on. Apple juice and tea were served, and candies were out on the counter.

Then they brought out the phones, and I noticed that they had the white iPhone for me. I asked if they had a black one, and it turned out they did, so I made the switch. It is exactly for this reason, however, that I strongly prefer seeing what something looks like before I buy it; only after the box was opened and the phone was in my hands did I notice that hand grime shows up rather significantly on the black finish. At least, it seemed that way, but later it turned out my hands were just grimy from all the exertion earlier. But even now, after using it for a while, the idea of the white back would be less of a color distraction than I imagined it to be, and the white surface, while more easily scuffed, would (probably) show hand oil smears a lot less prominently.

No big deal, though–it’s not as if this is a deal-breaker or anything, just a very mild case of color-related buyer’s regret. But that was the biggest disappointment, and not a very big one at that.

A few things about the shopping experience surprised me. First, they didn’t ask for my gaijin card or my passport as they had insisted they would, nor did they make a deal about my visa ending soon. I have no idea why, and didn’t intend to bring up the subject; maybe it was because I presented them with a driver’s license. Perhaps the gaijin card is expected because most foreigners don’t have DLs, and perhaps a license fills a prerequisite for trust that you won’t skip out of the country or something. Whatever.

Another surprise was that you get to choose your phone number with a level of precision greater than I have ever seen before. When I got our current home land-line number, I was not given any choice. Usually they give you two or three numbers to choose from. But with my phone (Sachi ported her old number to the new phone), I was allowed to choose exactly the last four digits. I chose the year of my birth, dead simple to remember, and more likely to be open than popular four-digit codes. And sure enough, the gal returned with three or four different prefixes I could use. One of them had a very nice sequence–3693–and so I chose that. Very nice; I will remember this number instantly, whereas I still don’t remember the PHS number I have used for the past ten years.

The last surprise was that they did not activate the iPhone in-store; they simply installed the SIM and told us to activate it when we got home. Probably this had to do with the fact that their instruction papers sucked and they didn’t want to deal with it in the store, I don’t know. Whatever the case, we would have only bricked iPhones that told us to connect the USB cable to a computer until we got home.

As it was past five p.m. when we left the store–the whole process took an hour and fifteen minutes–Sachi and I were looking to eat dinner soon, but figured we’d activate the phones first. So when we got home, I set out to do exactly that. There were a few hiccups involving the iTunes Store and our apparent location (Japan or the U.S.), but the activation part was easy enough–just connect and before you get to the iTunes Store, you receive an SMS message telling you that your phone number is active.

Let me depart from my narrative here and give a quick set of impressions. From the rather shoddy-looking artwork to the right, you can see the difference between my new iPhone and my old PHS. Sorry for the poor image, but it’s late and I’ve been too busy to really work up a nice graphic. The iPhone is a lot wider and flatter than a standard cell phone; it comes across as solid and slick. Of course, all I have to compare it with is my 5-year-old piece of crap PHS, next to which it appears almost magical.

I had been warned that the phone could slip out of my hands, but after handling it, I just don’t see it happening, unless my hands were so wet I wouldn’t want to touch the phone anyway. But one warning was more true than I thought: the thing smudges like a sonuvagun. I find myself wiping it a lot; I will either get used to the smudges, or I’ll get used to the wiping. Minor inconvenience. The Home button clicks nicely, and the volume and off switches are easy enough to use, but I have yet to figure out how to make the ring/vibrate button work. The touchscreen takes a bit of getting used to, and Sachi has been having a hard time with her nails being long–we’ll have to pick her up a stylus and right quick. I’ve had little trouble, although the “o” key on the virtual keyboard is hard to get–it always ends up as a “p.” I’ll give a more extensive review of the phone in my next post, as promised.

So Sachi and I played with them for a few minutes before heading out, and the obvious first choice was to use the Maps feature to see what restaurants were nearby. Sachi wanted Italian, and when we searched, we found one virtually across the street from our building, well-rated and relatively low-priced ($55 for us both), and as it turned out, the food was great. Sitting next to us was a group of four Japanese businessmen, and although I was not following the conversation, I could not help but overhear them talking about the iPhone more than once. I had to resist the urge to whip out mine and show it to them–Sachi expressly forbade me, and I’m not even sure I would have had the guts to anyway–but it was a big temptation nonetheless.

It was after we got back home that the real sussing out began. I should have foreseen that there would be difficulties, as I remember my sister having some trouble figuring things out. Complicating matters was the fact that Sachi was impatiently asking me about stuff every few minutes as she tried to work out her iPhone, and seemed miffed that I didn’t know all the answers. It’s hard enough to figure out setup processes for any device, even an Apple machine, without having to set your own machine down and work out what someone else has been doing when you were not paying attention, and then untangle their knots. Sachi was anxious to get email going so her friends could stay in touch.

We spent about an hour updating our Address Books; Sachi had to retype hers by hand, whereas I had to join and then pare down the two disparate address books from my desktop and laptop Macs, deleting the duplicates and updating numbers and addresses that had been neglected. Then we tried to sync, but hit a snag: Sachi’s phone had not yet been registered, and it won’t sync until we could get it registered–but it turned out that the iTunes Store, which you need to have an account with to register, was down from the huge surge of traffic. Sachi wouldn’t seem to accept this and kept expecting me to do something–the perils of being useful most of the time.

We occupied ourselves with testing and learning the other features of the phone, had fun with SMS, and learned a bit more about the settings and basic features. We also learned about how much SoftBank was unprepared when we tried to establish our SoftBank email accounts–they didn’t exactly work well.

I had already registered my phone, so it was syncing–and it synced all of my Mail.app email accounts (about a dozen of them). I had trouble figuring out exactly how it had handled each. Most didn’t seem to be working, but I think that’s more because they just didn’t get any mail, and so seemed inactive. There was trouble figuring out which account was being used to send what, what accounts worked, and so forth.

Sachi grew ever more impatient that we could not get SoftBank’s email to work, so I created a GMail account for her and got it working both in Mail.app and on her iPhone. She was pleased when the Mail.app version worked with her address book and we could do a mass mailing to all of her friends. Soon after that, we finally got her new iTunes account to work, and all was better, at least nominally in terms of functionality.

So from now, we’ll probably spend the weekend figuring things out. I will likely spend a horrific amount of time on hold with SoftBank’s service people as we try to figure out what’s wrong with their email service, and might even wait on hold with Apple to figure out a few other things. But already it’s been a lot of fun.

More details in the next post. Forgive me for not reviewing and editing this post as I usually do.

It’s a pretty interesting phenomenon here. The line at the Omote-Sando store is now huge, with more than a thousand people in line by now–some reports say 1500, and thousands more expected by tomorrow. Seriously, it’s a Festival environment there, looks just like cherry-blossom viewing or something. Tarps laid out, people drinking beer, the whole nine yards. Masayoshi Son, the head of SoftBank and a bit of a celebrity, is on the line shaking hands and stuff. Here’s the Twitter blog of a guy who got in line a few hours ago, and he’s about 850th in line.

TV and press reporters are all over the place there, and it’s becoming a pretty big media event. Sachi has a news show called ‘Zero“ on, and they had a pretty long segment on it, which included a live report from the flagship line, some demoes of an iPhone they got their hands on, and reports on stuff like the relationship between carriers and cell phone makers–how the makers are usually at the mercy of the carriers, but the iPhone is leading the carriers around by the nose.

Frankly, their handling of the phone was surprisingly clumsy, as if they had just been handed the thing for the first time (which it probably was). For example, they showed the Calculator app, but didn’t turn it on its side; they showed photos, but did not pinch to show zooming. They didn’t even try out maps, one of the most impressive features. They just turned stuff on and looked at it without actually doing anything; for example, they turned on the calendar and just sat there looking at a completely blank list, no appointments. Pretty lame.

But they are playing up the phone itself; this one show had a ticking clock showing how much time remains until the first one is sold. Pretty funny.