KDDI set for iPhone 5
Posted on September 22, 2011
KDDI Corp. (9433) will begin selling Apple Inc.’s iPhone 5 in the first quarter of 2012, The Nikkei learned Thursday.
The deal will allow the Japanese telecom firm to offer the latest version of the popular smartphone, ending Softbank Corp.’s (9984) exclusive deal with Apple in Japan and possibly shaking up the cell phone market.
— Source: Nikkei.com
If this is indeed true, hallelujah! I have hated SoftBank since day one – the network performance is beyond crap and I hate the way SB does business.
I will switch back to AU in a heartbeat!
AU has much better 3G speeds in Tokyo but the problems I’ve had with them is that the number of Antennas they have in Tokyo is actually a lot less than Docomo/Softbank. And I am constantly getting kicked off their network (calls getting cut off consistently) when in some odd dead zone which is quite often. I read somewhere it is because the kind of Antennas they use are more expensive.
Personally, Softbank is fine for me and I’m not going to be any hurry to change. I think Softbank will undercut AU in fees anyways, or offer some good deals. If Docomo were to get the iPhone I would change in a second but AU…I’ll wait.
I think your bad experience with AU is because the Media Skin mobilephone is a bad design. During my time with AU (4 years), I’ve never had a dropped call before, even with the Media Skin (although that device has horrible sound quality).
Yeah my MediaSkin was really bad. But actually I’m referring to recent experience.
My girlfriend uses AU and whenever I called her I always got cut off consistently (like every 30 seconds). It seems to only happen when non AU people call her but not the other way around (I called her on my iPhone). She kept blaming Softbank but then her Docomo friends had the same experience with her. So I did some research and apparently it seems to be quite common for AU users. Also the sound quality was utter crap but that may have been her Sony Ericsson phone. Anyways, I resolved the problem by buying her an iPhone.
The AU 3G data network might be an entirely different thing and probably better than both Softbank and Docomo from what I’ve read but I haven’t used it enough to judge for myself.