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发帖数: 1034 | 1 Posted May 28, 2014 by Catherine Shu (@catherineshu)
Apple announced today that it will begin to sell the iPad Air and iPad mini
with Retina display in Japan on NTT DOCOMO’s network starting June 10. NTT
DOCOMO is the country’s largest carrier and what is notable about the
announcement is that it has taken a relatively long time for company to
start offering the iPad Air and iPad mini with Retina display, which were
both released in November.
NTT DOCOMO’s site currently lists LTE plans for both iPad models, but they
won’t be available for pre-order until June 2, which also happens to be the
first day of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WDC) in San
Francisco.
This is not the first time that NTT DOCOMO has experienced in a delay before
offering a new Apple product. Back in October 2013, the company said it
experienced a record monthly drop in subscribers for September 2013, even
though it was the lone remaining major Japanese carrier without the iPhone
available until the release of the iPhone 5s and 5c, which also occurred in
September 2013. On the other hand, its competitors KDDI and Softbank
received net subscriber additions that month thanks to the iPhone’s launch.
Going further back, it took NTT DOCOMO until late 2013 to start selling the
iPhone, four years after competitor Softbank signed an exclusive deal with
Apple to start selling the iPhone 3G in Japan in 2008, which helped Softbank
become a bonafide NTT DOCOMO competitor.
In 2011, negotiations between Apple and NTT DOCOMO over the iPhone
reportedly dragged out because Apple was unwilling to let the carrier
install its own apps, including an e-wallet and mail service, on the
smartphones. In return, NTT DOCOMO expressed concern about the large volume
of iPhones Apple wanted it to commit to, with president and CEO Ryuji Yamada
telling Dow Jones Newswires that “if the introduction of the iPhone
results in the mass majority of our products occupied by the iPhone, then
that’s a scenario that’s difficult for us to swallow.”
A NTT DOCOMO spokesman told TechCrunch “Quite simply we have been
considering to have the iPad ready for our network, and it took a little
time to prepare for the launch. We have been getting requests from our
customers that they want to use iPad on DOCOMO’s network, so we are happy
that we can now offer it to our customers.” |
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