The survey was conducted from June 19 to June 25 and received 7,963 responses. Of the respondents, 90% were male. The iPhone will be introduced to the Japanese market by SoftBank Mobile Corp., the third ranked cell phone provider in Japan.

To the key question "Do you plan on buying an iPhone”, roughly 50% responded they would like to buy one or were seriously considering it. A total of 18.1% responded they were definitely planning to buy an iPhone including individuals who had already pre-ordered.

An interesting bit of information that became apparent was that there were roughly 30% of surveyed individuals who were considering purchasing the iPhone as a second cell phone for the features that typical Japanese cell phones lack such as a quality web browsing experience.

To the question "What do you like about the iPhone", the ability to listen to music and watch videos was a common answer. These are features certain Japanese cell phones do possess. The touch panel interface which is significantly different from the buttons used on typical Japanese cell phones was a selling point that helps the iPhone stand out from the crowd according to the survey.

A quality web browsing experience using the Safari web browser seems to be another selling point of the iPhone. The desire to view pictures and video was commonly mentioned. As a personal example on my Sony Ericsson W51S, the web browsing experience is poor and visiting one web page instantly uses up thousands of my allotted "packets" resulting in a higher monthly bill.

To the question "What might you not like about the iPhone", the high potential price was commonly mentioned. During this survey SoftBank Mobile Corp. announced their pricing plan revealing the 8GB model will cost 23,040 yen ($ 213.91 USD) and the 16GB model will cost 34,560.00 Yen (325.31 USD).

Judging from this survey, interest in the iPhone is quite high in Japan. Whether this is enough to make a significant impact on the Japanese cell phone market remains to be seen. As anyone who lives here can see daily, emails and text messages take precedence over communicating verbally. In general, I often hear that sending text messages on the iPhone takes getting used to but is workable. Personally I don't plan on getting an iPhone as I would be forced to switch carriers to do so.