iPhone touches down.(Business Break)

Big news of late was the announcement in June by SoftBank that it will be bringing Apple's iPhone to Japan later this year. With the wild popularity of the iPod in Japan, there is bound to be a big rush on the phones when they come out. It will be interesting to see if this can be sustained beyond the initial spurt. TV reports in Japan have focused on the difficulty of entering text via the touch-screen interface. One of the first challenges for Apple to overcome will be making it easy for users to enter Japanese text. Despite all the bells and whistles, email is still the 'killer app' on cell phones in Japan.

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