[lmm]

I remember the Sharp PDAs you had to import. That was 80% of the iphone right there. But they never seemed to market them (Samsung isn't particularly clever with their marketing but they throw enough money at it to make it work), or even be particularly interested in selling them abroad. I think they must've not been willing or able to do the carrier negotiation - our subsidized phone structures are a bit weird. Or just overestimated the popularity of wifi in the rest of the world based on that in a small, mostly urban country.

Sony on the other hand made some good stuff but was always just too controlling. The hardware was nice but you had to buy overpriced Memory Stick storage because Sony couldn't bear to use a standard format. And in the pre-android days you had to sell your soul to get a dev kit. (I realise Apple gets away with all of this but Sony doesn't have a reality distortion field). I get the feeling Japanese customers are willing to trust Sony in a way that foreign ones aren't.