Gauging the iPhone’s popularity in Japan is not easy.

Just ask Brian X. Chen. He wrote a piece for Wired.com last April called Why the Japanese Hate the iPhone suggesting that despite the long lines that greeted the iPhone 3G last summer, the device was a big flop in Japan.

“Apple’s iPhone has wowed most of the globe,” he wrote. “But not Japan, where the handset is selling so poorly it’s being offered for free.”

Chen had to issue an apology to readers and two major revisions after his piece was torn apart in AppleInsider by Daniel Eran Dilger, writing under the byline Prince McLean, for getting initial sales estimates wrong and badly misquoting a couple key sources. But neither Dilger nor Chen had a good handle on how the iPhone was actually selling.

Which is why there was some interest this week in a survey of 2,300 Japanese retail stores conducted by the market research company BCN, reported by nikkei.net and picked up Friday by the English language TG Daily.

According to this survey, cellphone sales are plummeting in Japan but sales of smartphones have grown 80% in the past year, with Apple (AAPL) clearly in the lead.

The survey listed the top 10 bestselling smartphones cellphones in Japan. Heading the list at No. 1 was the 32GB iPhone 3GS. Second in line was the 16 GB model.

According to TG Daily, Apple has sold 1 million iPhones since July 2008 through Softbank, its exclusive Japanese carrier. But take that number with a grain of salt; it sounds suspiciously like the initial sales estimate that got Brian Chen in so much trouble last April.

No. 3 in the BCN survey is the NTT DoCoMo Aquos SH-04A, designed by Sharp. Research in Motion’s (RIMM) BlackBerry Bold came in No. 6. Rounding out the top 10 list were four smartphones made by HTC.

UPDATE: On Sunday, Asiajin’s Akky Akimoto published an analysis of the survey that provides more detail and context — and corrects several errors in the initial report.

The BCN ranking turns out to be a weekly top 10 list of bestselling cellphones (not just smartphones) for the June 22 to 28 — the week the iPhone 3GS went on sale in Japan — and it was the new iPhones, not the old, that were the Nos. 1 and 2 bestsellers in Japan that week. Curiously, the new iPhones also appeared on a BCN survey the week before they actually went on sale, coming in at No. 174 (32GB) and No. 189 (16GB), respectively.

You can see the original BCN list in Japanese here.

Photo courtesy of Information Architects.

AT&T’s (T) widely leaked “best-ever sales day” memo ticking off the records set on June 19, 2009 — the day it began selling the iPhone 3GS — is packed with superlatives but notably lacking in numbers. (See memo below.)

Unlike Apple (AAPL), which reports on a quarterly basis how many iPhones it has shipped, AT&T keeps its unit sales figures close to its chest.

The new memo trumpets the fact that iPhone sales on June 19 “exceeded sales recorded on 2008’s iPhone launch day,” without saying how many phones it sold on either day.

But by extrapolating from previous quarters and reading between the lines, we can make some rough estimates. Here are the data points as we understand them:

• June 29 and 30: Apple launches first iPhone, and AT&T and Apple together sell 270,000 units in two days.  In its Q2 earnings call the next month, AT&T CFO Rick Lindner says his company activated 146,000 iPhones in the last day and a half of the quarter.
• Oct. 2007: Apple announces that it has sold a total 1.39 million iPhones; AT&T says it has activated 1.1 million of them.
• Jan. 2008: Apple says it has sold 4 million iPhones; AT&T says it has activated about 2 million (sparking much hand-wringing about the “missing” 2 million iPhones)
• July 11, 2008: Apple sells more than 1 million iPhone 3Gs in 21 countries over the space of three days. AT&T later says its stores sold nearly twice as many iPhones that weekend as they did the weekend of the first iPhone launch. Even if AT&T’s sales equaled Apple’s, that can’t be more than 270,000.
• Oct. 2008: Apple announces that it sold 6.9 million iPhones in its September quarter. AT&T says it activated 2.4 million of them, about 35%. (Overseas sales and unlocked iPhones presumably making up most of the difference.)
• Jan. 2009: AT&T says it activated more than 4 million iPhone 3Gs in the previous six months. In that period, Apple had sold 11.25 million iPhones. Again, AT&T’s activations represent about 35% of the total.
• June 2009: Apple launches the 3GS and again sells more than 1 million iPhones in the space of three days, but this time in only 8 countries, not 21.
• July 2: AT&T’s memo says it sold more iPhones over the June 19 weekend than it did over the July 11, 2008 weekend. That makes sense, given that the U.S. (and thus AT&T) share of Apple’s sales was larger this year.

Assuming the 35% ratio holds up, it’s not unlikely that AT&T will eventually activate about 350,000 of the new iPhones sold the weekend of June 19 — many of them Apple Stores — and that actually unit sales at AT&T outlets that weekend could easily exceed 300,000.

AT&T’s public relations department announced that it sold “hundreds of thousands” through its pre-order process prior to launch, and would say no more.

Photo courtesy of AppleInsider.

Below the fold: The iPhone portion of the AT&T memo, as leaked to MacDailyNews.

I’d heard about this new iPhone app, but it wasn’t until AT&T’s (T) sales pitch landed in my inbox Thursday morning that its significance hit home.

It’s called the AT&T Navigator — a turn-by-turn GPS navigation system for your car that runs on an iPhone 3G or 3GS.  From the press release and early reviews it sounds like it’s packed with features, from voice activation and spoken directions to the ability to search for the nearest Wi-Fi hotspot and the cheapest gas.

The problem with the application is how you pay for it. Downloading the Navigator is free. Owning it is expensive: $10 added to your monthly bill — even if you delete the app — until you contact AT&T and shut off the service.

Over the life of a two year AT&T contract, this one application could set you back $240, more than you paid for the iPhone itself.

Welcome to the world of subscription pricing, one of the more than 1,000 new application programming interfaces (APIs) added to the iPhone’s software development kit (SDK) last March.

“Included in these APIs,” promised Apple’s (AAPL) press release at the time, “is the ability to leverage the incredible purchase model of the App Store within apps. In-App Purchases will allow developers to offer subscription content and provide the ability to sell new content and features in a simple and secure process.”

Senior vice president for iPhone software Scott Forstall, when he talks about subscription purchases, likes to use the example of a book publisher who might want to charge customers $10 or $15 to download a new title. That seems fair. AT&T’s Navigator does not.

[See Adam Frucci's prescient Why iPhone In-App Transactions Could Be a Disaster, posted in Gizmodo way back in March.]

CLARIFICATION: Although iPhone 3.0 allows subscription pricing, it does not permit developers to sell add-ons to free apps. As several readers have pointed out, AT&T is not billing Navigator users through the App Store; rather, it is taking advantage of its position as the iPhone’s exclusive U.S. carrier to add the fee to customers’ monthly bills.

Color me old-fashioned, but when I buy an iPhone app — or for that matter, a GPS navigator for my car — I want to own the thing outright. I don’t expect to open my wallet to a Trojan Horse that’s going to ding me $10 a month for the rest of my days.

Tom Tom, the company that was invited by Apple to demonstrate its competing navigation system at the World Wide Developers Conference keynote last month, promised to announce details regarding pricing and availability this summer but has not yet done so. If I were in the market for an iPhone navigator, I’d keep my eye on that one.

Jonathan Ive, the reclusive designer of the iMac, iPod, PowerBook G4, MacBook and iPhone, made a rare public appearance Tuesday night at London’s Royal College of Art, where he was the guest of honor and featured speaker at an “Innovation Night” dinner.

The event was by invitation only, but one of the attendees was the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones, who filed an appreciative report on the Beeb’s dot.life site.

“What emerged,” writes Cellan-Jones, “were some fascinating insights into the culture of Apple and the craft of industrial design. Ive was insistent that the key to Apple’s success was that it was not driven by money – a claim that may raise eyebrows amongst shareholders and customers – but by a complete focus on delivering just a few desirable and useful products.’For a large multi-billion dollar company we don’t actually make many different products,’ he explained. ‘We’re so focused, we’re very clear about our goals.’ “

The format of the talk was a fireside chat with Sir Christopher Frayling, Rector of the Royal College. Among the highlights:

• “We don’t do focus groups,” Ive said firmly when asked how Apple (AAPL) decided what products to build. He explained that focus groups resulted in bland products designed not to offend anyone. (To which Sir Christopher added Henry Ford’s famous line that if he’d asked his customers what they wanted, they would have demanded a faster horse.)
• Ive stressed the physicality of design — “from the Apple design workshop full of machines, throwing off a lot of noise and dust,” writes Cellan-Jones, “to visits to Japanese aluminium craftsmen to learn how that material could be crafted into a laptop casing. Yes, of course he and his team use all the latest computer-aided design tools — but he also likes to knock out a physical prototype and feel the weight of it in his hand.”
• Ive told the story of how, as a young boy, he had taken apart an alarm clock and discovered inside the spare outer casing “an entire watch factory.”

“Extraordinary complexity wrapped in a simple, functional, touchable, beautiful case,” concludes Celan-Jones. “That seems to be the Apple design ethic.”

Got it in one.

Ive is scheduled to receive an honorary doctorate Wednesday from the Royal College, whose graduates include Ridley Scott (who directed the 1984 “Big Brother” Mac commercial), artist David Hockney and inventor James Dyson, designer of the Dyson vacuum.

[The photo of Ive in Apple's design shop courtesy of filmaker Gary (Helvetica) Hustwit, whose new documentary Objectified was released in March. Ive appears briefly in the trailer pasted below the fold.]

According to Morgan Stanley’s Kathryn Huberty, Apple (AAPL) is the computer maker with the “most upside” as the PC market begins to stabilize after the dismal first quarter of 2009.

There’s some good news for Hewlett Packard (HPQ) and Dell (DELL) in the report to clients Huberty issued overnight Wednesday, but it’s mostly attributed to enterprise cycles and inventory restocking.

Apple, however, is a different story.

“Even before the new Macbook Pros launched,” she writes, “Apple began to outperform the broader commercial PC segment — with commercial Mac shipments up 25% [month over month] in May versus market growth of just 1%.”

The fact that the new laptops arrived in early June means that they will provide what Huberty calls “a catalyst for growth” in both the June and September fiscal quarters. She points to NPD weekly shipment data (reproduced in the chart at left) showing steady acceleration of Mac shipments over the past few weeks. “Lastly,” she concludes, “suppliers have recently noted Mac unit upside in the quarter.”

Huberty is raising her forecast for Mac sales in the second calendar quarter (Apple’s fiscal Q3) to 2.5 million units, up from 2.4 million. That would represent 12% quarter to quarter growth — less than Apple’s 14% average over the past three years, but a lot better than the 4% QtoQ decline last quarter.

For the fiscal quarter than ended Saturday, she expects Apple to report earnings of $1.16 a share on PC revenue (i.e., not including iPhones, iPods, etc.) of $3.072 billion, up a point or two from her previous estimates.

Huberty has not always been so bullish on the Mac. In fact, one of her reports last September helped trigger the sharpest one-day fall in Apple’s share price in eight years, one that wiped $18 billion off the company’s market cap in the space of 60 minutes. See Why Apple’s shares took a nosedive.

To celebrate Steve Jobs’ official return to Apple (AAPL) this week, Kobi Shely has posted a YouTube clip from MacHEADS, his 54-minute “fanboy documentary” on the cult surrounding the company and its charismatic CEO.

Shely wrote, directed, co-produced and edited the film. The 2-minute 22-second segment he selected is centered around the return of Jobs to Apple in Dec. 1996 after he was ousted in a boardroom coup nearly a dozen years earlier.

The clip includes rare footage from the July 1998 keynote in which a younger, chubbier Jobs announces Apple’s return to profitability and introduces the first iMac.

It’s worth a look, if you can ignore the first 15 seconds of computer-generated weirdness, the bizarre Church of Mac segment in the middle and the young woman stroking and kissing her computer at the end.

The clip is pasted below. The full movie is available on iTunes and Amazon Video on Demand. Or you can order a DVD here.

Below the fold, a two-minute trailer for MacHEADS that includes sex columnist Violet Blue’s priceless line: “First of all, I’ve never knowingly slept with a Windows user. Ever.”

See also:

• Top 10 moments in Steve Jobs’ career
• Film: Inside the cult of Mac

Here’s an interesting measure of how effectively Apple (AAPL) can whip the tech world into a frenzy — even without Steve Jobs there to stir things up.

According to a report issued Monday by Nielsen Online, “anticipatory buzz” in May drew more than 55.7 million unique visitors to Apple’s website — more than double that of Hewlett Packard (HPQ) and 25 times the site for Microsoft’s (MSFT) Xbox.

The buzz got even louder in June with the unveiling of the iPhone 3GS. At one point between June 8 and June 9, nearly 0.6% of the nearly 100 million blogs, groups, boards, social networks and other consumer generated media that Nielsen tracks were talking about the new device. According to the report:

“the new iPhone 3G S sent blog mentions up 1,226 percent week-over-week on June 8, the day of the announcement. After the initial announcement, buzz dipped but again picked up after the phone became available to consumers on June 19, with blog mentions more than doubling compared to the week prior.”

You can actually see Apple’s buzz machine in action in the accompanying “BlogPulse” fever chart:

Nielsen Online is a division of the research company that has been measuring — and indirectly shaping — media content since it began tracking radio audiences in the 1930s and TV shares in the 1950s.

In the promotional material on its website, Nielsen offers the schematic drawing at right to suggest how its “BuzzMetrics” data mining service extracts nuggets of intelligence by harvesting raw data from sites like this one, cleaning it up, and giving it a good polishing with its relevance and analytics algorithms.

See also:

• Live from Apple WWDC 2009
• Watch Apple’s WWDC 2009 keynote
• Lines form in Tokyo and New York
• Live from the iPhone 3GS launch
• Steve Jobs: Apple sold over 1 million new iPhones

Technology’s most closely watched chief executive is officially back on the job, according to an Apple (AAPL) spokesman.

“Steve Jobs is back to work,” chief spokesperson Steve Dowling told CNN.com. “He is at Apple a few days a week and working from home the other days. We’re glad to have him back.”

Jobs, who is recovering from two major surgeries — one to remove a tumor from his pancreas nearly five years ago, the second a transplant performed two months ago to treat end-stage liver disease — was scheduled to return from a six-month leave of absence before the end of June.

Apple’s share price took a hit after news of the liver transplant appeared in print on June 20, but the stock has recovered since.

Jobs was spotted on Apple’s Cupertino, Calif., campus a week ago — walking on his own without cane or wheelchair — but it was unclear whether that was a one-shot appearance or the beginning of a more normal work schedule.

Today’s statement suggests that he will be more present — and more deeply involved in managing Apple’s affairs — than many analysts suspected.

Apple COO Tim Cook has been running the company in Jobs’ absence and has won high marks Apple watchers for his steady hand.

No new photographs of Jobs have surfaced since his return (the one here was taken in June 2008). Until last week, he had not been seen in public since he hosted an Apple event in Cupertino last fall.

In a sign that should bode well for Apple’s (AAPL) earnings in its third fiscal quarter — which ended Saturday — the MacBook has clawed its way back to the top of Amazon’s (AMZN) bestseller lists.

The Mac, which once led the pack in the online retailer’s Computers & PC Hardware Bestsellers category despite its $1,000 to $2,000 sticker prices, had fallen behind the blistering sales pace set by netbooks like the Asus Eee and the Acer Aspire One, which sell in the $300 to $400 range.

By June 1, the bestselling Apple computer on the list — a white plastic MacBook — had been pushed down to the No. 14 position.

But netbooks have started to fall out favor recently — as witnessed by reports of return rates as high as 30% and an NPD study that found that 60% of consumers who bought them didn’t understand the difference between a netbook and a notebook.

Meanwhile, Apple announced on June 8 that it was refreshing its notebook line and lowering its prices. Result: its computers have become hot sellers on Amazon once again.

Apple’s entry-level 13-inch unibody MacBook, renamed the MacBook Pro, has been one of Amazon’s top 100 bestsellers for 20 days — basically since the moment it went on sale. As of Monday morning, it was the site’s No. 4 bestselling computer overall and No. 1 in the laptop category.

In fact, three of the top 10 and five of the top 20 bestselling laptops on Amazon are now MacBooks.

Apple is not the only beneficiary of what some see as growing consumer disillusion with netbooks. HP (HPQ) Pavilions, Toshiba Satellites and Samsung Mini Notebooks are also selling briskly online.

See also:

• AMEX vs. Amazon; Macs vs. netbooks
• Amazon’s Christmas bestsellers: Acer, Apple and Asus

The iPhone availability widget is back — new and improved — and it’s showing spot shortages of selected iPhones at Apple (AAPL) stores across the United States.

The availability tool, which appears on Apple’s website in times of scarcity, was last seen in the summer of 2008, when demand for the iPhone 3G was heavy and supplies short.

When it reappeared on Friday, only 29 of Apple’s 257 stores were displaying shortages of any iPhones, according to IFOAppleStore, a website that keeps close tabs of Apple’s retail business.

By Sunday morning, however, there were red “sold out” lights for selected 3GS models in all but six states.

Kentucky’s only store, in Louisville, was completely out of stock.

This year’s model of the widget is considerably more accurate than the original. Last year, availability numbers were updated at the end of each business day. This year, according to IFOAppleStore, the page is linked directly to Apple’s internal point-of-sale computers, allowing hourly updates for each store.

The shortages are all over the lot, but Apple seems to be having a particularly hard time meeting demand for the entry-level white iPhone 3GS. In Texas, the 16GB model is sold out in all but three of the state’s 15 Apple Stores. It’s not clear whether demand for that model is unusually high or if Apple just isn’t making enough of them.

To check availability in the Apple Store nearest you, click here.

AT&T (T) has had 3GS supply problems from Day 1, but the widget doesn’t cover their stores.

According to Apple, the older 8GB iPhone 3G is available in all its stores.

See also:

• iPhone 3G: Sold out in 21 states
• Where did all the iPhones go?