I lived in Tokyo for much of the last 20 years ... Japan is covered in bicycles, to the extent that it can be hard to get near train stations due to the masses of bikes, and that's with the local authorities clearing them away on a daily basis. So I'm somewhat surprised by the "barely saw bikes in Tokyo" comment. Would have been hard to miss I would've thought. Bikes aren't toys in Japan, they're core transport: you ride your bike to the train station, you park it there and then you catch a fast, regular, clean and punctual train to work. Hard as it may be for people in the US to understand, in the Japanese cities you just don't drive a car to work - there's no reason to and in any case it'd be hard to provide parking for the 3 million or so people who go through Shinjuku station each day. These electric bikes have been around for a while but haven't really caught on yet - but the companies making them obviously think that they will. Oh, and Y136,000 is pocket-change for most Japanese ... so it's not the "gullible-rich" that will be buying them.
The N9 has arrived. What we can say from our first experience is that we're in the presence of a fantastically designed device with a gorgeous AMOLED screen and some highly responsive performance.
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I lived in Tokyo for much of the last 20 years ... Japan is covered in bicycles, to the extent that it can be hard to get near train stations due to the masses of bikes, and that's with the local authorities clearing them away on a daily basis. So I'm somewhat surprised by the "barely saw bikes in Tokyo" comment. Would have been hard to miss I would've thought. Bikes aren't toys in Japan, they're core transport: you ride your bike to the train station, you park it there and then you catch a fast, regular, clean and punctual train to work. Hard as it may be for people in the US to understand, in the Japanese cities you just don't drive a car to work - there's no reason to and in any case it'd be hard to provide parking for the 3 million or so people who go through Shinjuku station each day.
These electric bikes have been around for a while but haven't really caught on yet - but the companies making them obviously think that they will. Oh, and Y136,000 is pocket-change for most Japanese ... so it's not the "gullible-rich" that will be buying them.