Cody Taylor

A report intending to portray the iPhone as “hated” in the Japanese market turns out to have been built upon fake quotations from industry writers and observers who were misrepresented by remarks attributed to them that they never made. Their actual comments on the iPhone’s prospects in Japan are far more interesting.

While we’re excited about Oregon Trail for the iPhone, not every classic game works well for the touchscreen platform. The phone’s lack of real buttons makes anything requiring precision a lost cause. iPhone Contra would be an epic train wreck. But other games would work great. Here are five we’d love to see.

.5 million. Two. Point. Five. Million. Dollars. That’s what some idiot is going to pay for what could be the most expensive iPhone mod ever, the iPhone 3G “Kings Button”.

Apple’s iPhone has wowed most of the globe — but not Japan, where the handset is selling so poorly it’s being offered for free.

An anonymous reader writes to tell us that Parkingticket.com just announced new compatibility with the Safari web browser on Apple’s iPhone, giving you new tools to immediately contest a parking ticket. The site is so confident in their service that if all steps are followed and the ticket is still not dismissed they will pay towards your ticket. “The process begins by navigating the iPhone’s Safari browser to the Parkingticket.com website where you’ll find a straightforward means to fight a parking ticket; whether the ticket was issued in New York City, San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia or Washington, D.C. Simply register for a free account and choose the city in which the ticket was issued. Enter your ticket and vehicle details then answer a few quick questions. The detailed process takes about ten minutes, from A-Z. To allow easy entry of your ticket, a look-a-like parking ticket is displayed – for your specific city – with interactive functionality.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ponca City, We love you writes “With a high level of technical sophistication, critical customers, and high innovation rate, Japan is the toughest cell phone market in the world. So it’s not surprising that although Apple is the third-largest mobile supplier in the world, selling 10 million units in 2008, in Japan the iPhone is selling so poorly it’s being offered for free. The country is famous for being ahead of its time when it comes to technology, and the iPhone just doesn’t cut it. For example, Japanese handset users are into video and photos — and the iPhone has neither a video camera, multimedia text messaging, nor a TV tuner. Pricing plans in Japan are also very competitive, and the iPhone’s -and-up monthly plan is too high compared to competitors; a survey lat year showed that among Japanese consumers, 91% didn’t want to buy an iPhone. The cellular weapon of choice in Japan would be the Panasonic P905i, a fancy cellphone that doubles as a 3-inch TV and features 3-G, GPS, a 5.1-megapixel camera, and motion sensors for Wii-style games. ‘When I show this to visitors from the US, they’re amazed,’ according to journalist Nobi Hayashi, who adds, ‘Carrying around an iPhone in Japan would make you look pretty lame.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today CBS pushed out a streaming video player for iPhones and touchy iPods, with smooth navigation of all the content available on its TV.com, including impressive full-length episodes of some, but not most, shows.

svonkie writes “Despite launching on the T-Mobile G1 with little mainstream fanfare, Google Inc.’s Android OS appears to have gained strong interest in the open source development community. According to a survey of Black Duck Software’s Knowledge Base, Apple Inc.’s iPhone led the industry with 266 open source project releases during 2008, while Android followed in second place with 191 releases. Black Duck compiled the data after scouring through over 185,000 of open source projects across 4,000 Internet sites.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.