TOKYO — Tomoaki Kurita presides over racks of cellphones lined up outside his shop on a busy sidewalk in Harajuku, Tokyo's catwalk of youth street culture where people attracted by the riot of phone options can stop to flip open and fondle the latest models of what the Japanese call \o7keitai\f7.
From behind his busy counter, Kurita giggles when asked about the excitement in America over the arrival of Apple's iPhone, which can also be used to download music and surf the Internet.
"Sounds like business as usual," he says.
On the day when stock markets swooned and techies buzzed over Apple Inc. Chief Executive Steve Jobs' long-awaited entry into the mobile-phone market, Japanese consumers could be excused for wondering: Why the fuss?
Yes, the iPhone seemed to reaffirm Apple's ability to wow with design. Its finger-driven navigation might bring a new level of sophistication to the way cellphones operate. But many Japanese had a harder time buying Jobs' line about "reinventing" the phone.
"Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything," Jobs said as he unveiled the iPhone on Tuesday at the Macworld Conference & Expo in San Francisco.
But the revolution is already well underway in Japan, where cellphones are used for everything. Besides downloading music and surfing the Net, Japanese use their cellphones to navigate their way home by global positioning system, to buy movie tickets and to update personal blogs from wherever they are.
They have been a natural extension of daily life here for the last few years, spurred by Japan's decision to be the first country to upgrade to third-generation mobile-phone networks, or 3G, which increase broadband capabilities and allow for better transmission of voice and data.
Apple's iPhone, by comparison, will operate on a second-generation network.
It was 3G that sparked the boom in music downloads that makes it common for phones to be used as portable digital music players here.
And it is 3G that has led the Japanese into a world where they can watch live TV on their phones and use them as a charge card to ride trains or buy milk at the corner store or take a taxi. Ticket Pia, Japan's major entertainment ticketing agency, has been selling e-mail tickets to cellphones since October 2003. The phones also can be used to conduct conference calls among as many as five people.
