Domo arigato, the iPhone is coming to Japan

By Christina Warren

The internationalization of the iPhone continues as SoftBank Mobile, Japan's third-largest mobile operators, has announced that it has signed an agreement with Apple to sell the iPhone in the "Land of the Rising Sun" later this year.

Although not detailed in the press release, I expect that the Japanese iPhone will be very different, internally, from its counterparts from other parts of the world. Not only will the phone have to be W-CDMA (GSM is not deployed in Japan, though some other SoftBank phones are dual-band GSM/W-CDMA for international roaming), there may be other locks tying the phone to the carrier.

Update: To clarify, the next generation iPhone will be 3G, or UMTS based, but the bands used by US carriers are different than those used in Japan (and in Europe and other parts of the world for that matter). Whether or not the phones will be able to switch between bands without some sort of hardware unlock remains to be seen.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

[via: Reuters]

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