“NTT DoCoMo Inc., Japan’s largest mobile-phone operator, will be flexible in negotiations with Apple Inc. to offer the iPhone, President Ryuji Yamada said,” Pavel Alpeyev and Junko Kikkawa report for Bloomberg.
“Yamada, who took over as president last month, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television in Tokyo today, ‘Our stance on the iPhone remains flexible,’ he said, without elaborating,” Alpeyev and Junko Kikkawa report.
“Yamada, 58, faces a shrinking market share for DoCoMo, whose lineup of mobile phones and services offers little distinction from that of Softbank Corp. and KDDI Corp. DoCoMo, which includes its trademark i-mode Web-browsing software in all handsets, lost out to Softbank for the right to sell the iPhone from July 11,” Alpeyev and Junko Kikkawa report.
“Softbank may sell about 1 million of the handsets in six months to a year, according to Kenji Nishimura, a Tokyo-based analyst at Deutsche Bank AG,” Alpeyev and Junko Kikkawa report. “DoCoMo, which has been in discussions with Apple to offer the iPhone, ‘hasn’t given up yet,’ Yamada said June 23.”
More in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The iPhone have-nots are getting antsy — and rightfully so. The prospect of trying to push iPhone lookalikes-not-workalikes for years must be quite painful to ponder.