Apple got a bit pushy with Japan’s wireless service providers, and was slapped down by regulators as a result.
The iPhone maker was requiring the carriers to put subsidies on iOS handsets. The Japanese Fair Trade Commission decided that was a violation of Japan’s antitrust rules.
Apple devices are already wiping the floor with the competition in Japan — but things look to be getting even better on the iOS front, thanks to news that the iPad Air and iPad mini with Retina display are set to launch on the DoCoMo network in two week’s time.
With more than 63 million mobile subscribers, NTT DoCoMo is the largest mobile service provider in Japan.
“With the addition of iPad alongside iPhone, we now offer the complete lineup of Japan’s most popular mobile devices on the nation’s most reliable LTE network,” says NTT DoCoMo CEO Kaoru Kato.
In every country, there’s the holdouts, the also-ran carriers that haven’t inked a deal with Apple and so soldier valiantly on, selling Android and (gasp) Blackberries to their sad clientele. In Japan, this also-ran carrier happens to be the nation’s largest, NTT DoCoMo. But eventually, even the holdouts come around, and shares of NTT DoCoMo are up this morning following reports that Apple is in talks to bring the iPhone to the network.
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — As ever, NTT DoCoMo has some weird new tech to show off at the Mobile World Congress. This year, it’s a cellphone battery that charges fully in just ten minutes. and if you’re really in a hurry, you can get enough juice to last a couple of hours in just a minute.
There are hundreds of thousands of cases out there that promise to protect your beloved iPhone, but the ‘Nissan Scratch Shield’ case is the only one that will self-heal itself when you scratch it thanks to the Japanese company’s pioneering paint technology.
For Apple, the iPhone’s clean desktop is simply an extension of its overall minimalist design. While keeping control of what apps appear on the smartphone makes fans of users, forbidding so-called carrier ‘junkware’ could be a deal-breaker for NTT DoCoMo, Japan’s largest wireless provider.
