iPhoningJapan.com is delighted to bring you the most epic iPhone challenge yet seen in the world (probably).

Joseph Tame, known for his addiction to his iPhone (a.k.a. ‘my baby’) is going to attempt to complete the Tokyo quarter Marathon in record time whilst carrying 30,603 pairs of eyes on his forehead. This epic feat has been made possible by months of training, an Apple iPhone, Qik.com and a new invention of Joseph’s, which he calls ‘A Modified Hat’.

He will be joined by his trainer, Tom Kobayashi.

35,603 people applied to run this epic race across Tokyo – only 5000 got in: Joseph and Tom were two of the lucky few.

Knowing how disappointed the unlucky unfortunates must be feeling, Joseph vowed to make things right. He decided, he’d let them run with him.

The full story of this epic adventure will be featured on the new podcast that Joseph co-produces – Japan Podshow.

To get live alerts via twitter of Joseph’s progress & broadcasts, be sure to follow him @tamegoeswild.

Exclusive behind-the-scenes footage of this epic challenge is also available on YouTube.

Be there and submit your comments as he runs to make his iPhone vibrate – he’ll know he’s carrying your eyes and your hopes too.

UPDATE! JOSEPH POSTS VIDEO RESPONSE TO CRITICISM

“…if you are a gaijin, it’s way easier to get married in Japan than to buy an iPhone!!

Read Jerome’s full post here.

Last week I did the unthinkable – left my iPhone on a train.

I’d just stepped off a Tokyu line express at Kita Senju in the north-east of Tokyo. Reaching into my pocket to check my Twitter account for the 76th time in 20 minutes, I found to my horror that it wasn’t there – nor in any of my other pockets.

There followed an agonising wait of almost two hours as the station staff phoned ahead to stations down the line to ask them to search the train – but at each one they reported that they’d just missed the train.

The situation was made a little more stressful by my losing my wife at the same time, but that’s another story…

Finally, the call came through – it had been handed in at Koshigaya station, some 12 stops down the line.

Would this happen anywhere else? I’m pretty sure that had it been the UK that’s the last I would have seen of it.

Initially, I thought that this was simply because Japanese people are honest and altuistic – but a tip-off from my friend who found the police knocking on his door six months after he’d claimed his lost-then-found wallet from the local koban (police box) prompted me to look into the subject a little further.

The reason for their visit was simple – my friend had failed to pay a reward to the finder of his lost property, and thus was breaking the Japanese Finders’ Law.

Japanese finders’ law creates well-defined incentives to encourage finders to report their finds and disincentives to misappropriation. To use Levmore’s (1986) finders’ law vocabulary, Japanese finders’ law provides a simple system of carrots and sticks. Japanese civil law provides that a person who finds a lost article shall deposit it with the police, or with the security office of the building in which it is found, if such an office exists. The law then provides two carrots. First, if the owner claims the object, he or she must pay the finder a fee of 5 to 20% of the object’s value. Second, if no one claims the object in a specified period of time, the object is returned to the finder (Civil Code [Minpo] 1896, 1898; Ishitsubutsuho 1899).

Japanese criminal law also provides a stick. Although Japanese law contains no penalties for nonrescue (a finder is free to look the other way from lost property3), a finder who misappropriates the property for his or her own has committed embezzlement and is subject to a fine of up to 100,000 yen and imprisonment of up to one year. I have found that while prosecution of adult offenders for the ordinary appropriation of lost property is rare, embezzlement of lost property is the second only to larceny in the number of juvenile cases brought by police to prosecutors (Tamiya & Hirose 1998:155), and adults are often prosecuted in particular situations, such as when the acquisition is connected with a more serious crime or when intent is particularly obvious. Even when prosecution is not initiated, the process of investigation in Japan is often a punishment in itself.

[source]

My (Japanese) partner however tells me that a lot of people aren’t really aware of the law (especially young people), and that it’s being handed in would more likely be due to the fact that that is the done thing. I guess ultimately it depends on the individual stance of the people who ignored it and / or the person who handed it in.

Whatever the reason though, I’m glad I was able to get it back so swiftly. Two hours with no Twitter access was almost more than I could bear.

The only problem was, iTunes couldn’t connect with it – just kept on asking me to enter the phone’s passcode …which I couldn’t do as the phone wouldn’t let me do anything except make emergency calls. Catch 22.

(For google reference, the error message read:

“iTunes could not connect to the iPhone “*” because it is locked with a passcode. You must enter your passcode on the iPhone before it can be used with iTunes”

This all happened when I was actually in the Apple Store on unrelated business (looking at new macbooks!), but they were so busy I had no chance of seeing the Geniuses (they’re the people who fix stuff), and the sales staff didn’t know what to do. I made an appointment for the following night, and using their in-store wifi started scouring the Apple forums.

Eventually I found out how to force the iPhone into recovery mode (connect to computer, open iTunes, press both buttons until Apple logo appears, then only release the top button, hole the bottom one until iTunes recognises it as being in recovery mode and restores it to factory settings). However, after it rebooted it just came up with another error, “The iPhone “*” cannot be used with iTunes because the information required for activation could not be obtained from the iPhone”. There was nothing I could do but wait until the following night’s appointment.

This being Japan, I was kind of expecting it to take a long time to sort out. Everything here seems to involve endless form-filling – you even have to provide a notarised copy of your birth certificate in order to buy a loaf of bread. (OK, slight exaggeration, maybe.) One problem I saw was the fact that the phone is registered to *Twinkle*, and she was unable to come to the store.

What happened then really surprised me. The chap listened to my story, quickly tested the SIM card in another iPhone (it was fine) …and then reached into the drawer behind him, pulled out a brand new iPhone and handed it to me.

“Is that OK?” he asked.

“Erm, yes!” I said, with a big grin on my face.

“Oh, if you could just sign this receipt to say that Apple will pay that’ll be it”.

And that was it.

Having left the store, it was simply a case of plugging the new phone into my Macbook and leaving it for 30 mins as it restored all my settings (and 15GB of emails, contacts, photos music and apps), resulting in a brand new phone that was identical in content & settings to my old one.

Now THAT is what customer service of the future should be like. It was even accompanied by the happiest music one could hope to hear, wafting up the stairs from the live concert on the ground floor.

Of course, there are reasons why this all happened so quickly and without any fuss. For a start, they were incredibly busy, and the guy was desperate to get through the queue. For a second thing, they already had all my details to hand, as when I made my appointment I’d logged in with my Apple ID.

Still, I thought it was all bloomin marvellous, Yet another excuse to give my money to Apple.

I was sitting in Kitanomura park at lunchtime, eating my carrot and daikon salad, whilst watching the children play.

I wondered what the view from my bench might look like at other times of year, so I tapped the screen of my iPhone once, and a few seconds later was presented with a whole collection of photos taken within metres of where I sat, including one of the very bench I was sitting on. Someone else was sitting on it.

It felt a bit funny.

The wonders of modern technology.

But here I am starting a new life in Japan, and in need of a phone.

Buying the iPhone in Japan

The initial rush seems to have subsided, although stocks are still limited: we called our local Softbank store (having first phoned the Apple store in vain), and checked availability. They had 1 available, 16GB black.

The sign up process is pretty lengthy. You have to read through a few pages of Apple’s terms and conditions, then donate a kidney. It can be difficult for foreigners to get them as there’s a credit check, and a two year contract (they don’t want you skipping the country before paying all the monthly instalments). We decided that *Twinkle* would buy mine – far simpler If you don’t have someone willing to buy one for you, credit card is the way to go.

The plans cost anything between about 5000 yen and 9000 yen a month, + phone calls: this pays for the device itself and the data plan. I don’t like making phone calls (especially not at 20 yen a minute, which I discovered after a total of 3 hours on the phone) so that’s fine for me, I’m just in it for the data. Calls to other Softbank / Vodafone users are free at certain times.

You are given a Softbank (IMAP) email address. Personally, I like to use my own domain email address (…[at]tamegoeswild.com) so I’ve configured Google Apps to forward a copy of incoming mobile mail to Softbank (who then send an alert to the phone), and manually set the outgoing server to Gmail SMTP.

Once you have the device, be prepared to fall in love. As Steve would say, it is absolutely gorgeous. I mean, really, it is the most beautiful piece of technology I have ever had the privilege to take care of. And the best thing of all? It Just Works. It’s incredibly easy to use – I’ve not yet had to refer to the manual. It’s simple enough for even a four-year-old to understand – yesterday my little nephew was able to figure out how to switch between applications in a couple of minutes.

If you are an existing Mac user setting up your phone couldn’t be simpler – just plug it in. iTunes will sync all your contacts, email accounts, calendars, to do lists, photos, music, videos, just like that. It may be a little more complex for Windows users but they should be used to frustration anyway.

In the past I’ve always found it a pain to put data on mobile phones, and was also afraid that if I lost the phone, I’d lose my data. Here, all the data is safely stored on your computer / in the cloud, then synched to your iPhone either over the Internet or when you plug it in.

Applications

I won’t go through all my apps because I’d be here all day. Just to mention one of my Japanese favourites – Ekitan: the entire national train timetable, live updates on delays, a cache so you can refer to searches when there’s no signal, history of previous searches (for repeat journeys). And all with a lovely user-freindly interface. Yes, other phones can do this too – but not whilst oozing sex appeal.

I also like the fact that it has decent built-in speakers – I use it to listen to audiobooks just before I go to bed.

Where the iPhone falls down in Japan

Rather than just go on about how good the iPhone is (there’s plenty of sites dedicated to doing so already), I thought I’d point out some features – or lack of features – that are specific to Japan.

• My biggest gripe comes as the result of the iPhone being designed for a country that uses SMS, not email, for texting. Japan does use SMS, but it will only work with people who are on the same carrier as you. Here, email is dominant. Apple have tried to address this by having Softbank send an alert when you get new mail, but this is only a message on the screen – no vibrate and no sound. I hope they rectify this soon.
• The mail program doesn’t support eMoji, those little pictures people love to put in their texts. They just get scrambled. If the picture is core to the meaning of the message this can be a problem – you can read the message in Safari at the touch of a button, but it’s a bit of a drag.
• The packages are way too expensive.
• Visual voicemail doesn’t come as standard. I think it’s another 300 yen a month.
• Battery life. Ok, so that’s not limited to Japan, but it is still the iPhone’s biggest ‘issue’.
• The camera is probably the most pants camera to have been mass-marketed this year. Emergency use only.

It’s early days though, with it only having been launched here last month. What a lot of users are doing is using it as a secondary device – with all my family here on AU (not Softbank) I’ll probably go that way myself.

At least the 3G network is reliable – it really is super fast. You rarely find yourself waiting excessively for it to load. I also love the fact that it has Wifi – at home (or at friends’ houses, or where’s there’s public wifi) it automatically switches from 3G to the wireless broadband connection, thus not costing a penny in data transfer.

he introduction of ‘Genius’ with the latest version of iTunes is very welcome, and over the past couple of days I’ve been delighted to find some ‘new’ music that I never knew I had. Great stuff.

I find it really exciting to be able to use these new devices, and also to think where they might go in the future. I won’t be buying any more gadgets for a long time – perhaps next year I’ll get a Nikon DSLR with video function and in-built GPS (in the D700 line).

Incidentally, a good side-effect of my having an iPhone is that I spend a lot less time in front of my Mac. Being able to deal with emails on the road when I have a spare few minutes here and there means I don’t come home to a pile of stuff to wade through, and consequently don’t get distracted by browsing the internet – so the iPhone is pretty good for our relationship too!

Anyway, it’s just flashed up a reminder that I need to go to the toilet. According to the GPS system, the loo is located about 4 metres south-west of this cushion, and I have a date to be there by 12.34pm. Best be off.