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.

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?

Those 1 million iPhone GSs sold last weekend represent a “remarkable achievement,” writes RBC Capital’s Mike Abramsky in a note to clients issued early Tuesday, especially considering the new iPhone’s relatively narrow international distribution (8 countries vs. 21 last year).

But according to Abramsky, it’s the old iPhone 3G — newly priced at $99 — not the new 3GS, that will drive global sales this fiscal year.

“While early buyers appeared to favor the iPhone S,” he writes, “the $99 iPhone is expected to drive 30-40% momentum improvement, in countries like UK, Germany, France, and other parts of Europe and Asia where phones are more highly subsidized (on contract) and prepaid is popular (e.g. ~60% prepay in UK, ~90% in emerging markets like India).”

Abramsky expects Apple to sell 20 million iPhones in fiscal 2009, 64.5% of them the older 3G models. By his estimates the new 3GS won’t dominate sales until fiscal 2010, when he expects Apple to sell 30 million iPhones, roughly 60% of them 3GSs. See chart and spreadsheet below.

On Monday, Apple announced that it sold 1 million iPhones 3GSs in three days of sales. The company has not released the number of iPhones 3Gs sold since that device’s price was lowered to $99 from $199 on June 8.

More than 12 hours before Apple (AAPL) began selling the new iPhone in the United States, a team from RapidRepair had already picked up an iPhone 3GS in France and begun to tear it apart.

The Kalamazoo, Mich., electronics repair shop took advantage of the fact that a Parisian Orange Boutique was hosting a midnight (6 p.m. EDT) iPhone release event and flew CEO Aaron Vronko to the City of Lights to buy one of the first.

By Thursday 6:37 p.m. EDT Vronko had a 3G S in hand and was attacking it with small Phillips screw driver, small flathead, heat gun, Exacto razor, suction cup and Rapid Repair’s own Safe Open Tool (available for sale).

You can view the step by step disassembly — with helpful hints for how to do it yourself  (while voiding your warranty)– at their website. If you are very careful, the end result looks something like this:

Below the fold, a side-by-side comparison of two motherboards: the 3GS  and the 3G, with Rapid Repair’s analysis of the new chipset.

New data from ComScore showing that 32.4% iPhone owners have downloaded at least one game — compared with only 3.8% for the average cell phone owner –  sparked some fresh analysis of the booming iPhone (and iPod touch) game market.

As of Tuesday morning, according 148Apps, there were 18,737 applications on the App Store and 4,078 of them — nearly 22% — were games.

Why so many?

The obvious first answer is that games are very popular. Six out of the top 10 paid apps on Apple’s (AAPL) App Store are currently games or entertainment programs, which makes those categories particularly attractive to software developers.

On Monday, MacRumors dug up some back-of-the-envelope calculations done in mid-January for Byte of the Apple by Jeff Holden, CEO of Pelago software, who calculated that the 17 million-plus iPhone users had downloaded as much software as 1.6 billion other cell phone users.

“To a developer,” he wrote, “what this means is that if he launches an app for non-iPhones (assuming he has deals with all carriers and has ported to every handset in distribution on which people can download apps), he needs to have a reach 94 times as large as the reach he needs in the iPhone community (which does not require any carrier deals and is via single platform, so no porting) to achieve the same number of downloads.

“Why,” Holden concludes, “would I ever build for anything but the iPhone?”  (link)

But there are even deeper reasons for the iPhone’s popularity among game developers, and over the weekend Prince McLean laid them out in a thoughtful post for AppleInsider.

McLean cites an easy-to-use software store, attractive pricing, a nearly-invisible DRM scheme to ward off pirating, a Mac OS-like application development environment and particularly lucky timing (the iPhone 3G launched and the App Store opened six months before the economy officially tanked).

The result is a software ecosystem that produces real gaming value at bargain prices.

“Combined with the sophisticated iPhone hardware platform, with hardware accelerated 3D graphics and a decently powerful CPU,” McLean writes, “Apple’s App Store games even give dedicated handheld gaming devices a run for their money.” (link)

To illustrate his point, McLean posts screen shots — reproduced below — of Sega’s popular Super Monkey Ball as it appears on four platforms (and at four price points):

• Nokia’s NGage version for smartphones ($20, top left)
• A dumbed-down mini-game version for the Nokia N95 ($10, top right)
• The iPhone version ($10, middle)
• The same title on the Sony PlayStation Portable ($40, bottom).

See the difference? There’s your answer.

See also:

• 500 million apps and counting
• Apple challenges Sony and Nintendo

If a picture is worth a thousand words, here’s five grand worth of Apple (AAPL) news in charts and lists released over the past couple of days.

1. Web Brands. Apple scored No. 10 in Nielson Online’s ranking of the top Web brands based on the number of unique visitors each site drew in December 2008 — which isn’t bad considering Apple.com’s focus is so much narrower than the brands it’s up against, like Google (GOOG), Yahoo (YHOO) and Amazon (AMZN). (link)

2. Social Brands. The iPhone scored No. 1 — ahead even of its parent company at No. 3 — in the Vitrue 100, a new ranking launched this week by an Atlanta-based marketing company with a deliberately misspelled name. Vitrue’s list ranks blue chip brands by how often they get mentioned in blogs, photo-sharing sites and such social media entities as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter — presumably a measure of how large these names loom in the minds of an emerging category of early adopters.

3. Days to 1 Million. This comes from an Engadget reader named Noel F. who used published sales data to compare the rate at which the leading smartphones achieved the market penetration milestone of 1 million units. However, as Engadget’s Tom Ricker notes, this leaves out the important factor of geographical footprint at launch. The Google Android G1, for example, launched only in the United States. The iPhone 3G was released simultaneously in 21 countries. (link)

4. Volume vs. Revenue. CounterNotions’s Kontra uses data from GigaOm’s Jose Fermoso to demonstrate that what matters is not how many smartphones you sell, but how much you make on each sale. Unfortunately, both writers’ comparisons are a bit off since Apple’s Q1 numbers include revenue and earnings not just from iPhones, but also from Macs, iPods and other goodies.

5. Stock Price. Finally, a glance at Apple’s share price, which having suffered a thousand cuts in the past year finally picked up a little traction in the past two weeks.

For much of last year, AT&T (T) Mobility’s websites seemed to be promoting every cell phone in their arsenal except for the iPhone — as if the company wasn’t sure the revenue coming in from iPhone users was worth the steep bounty it was paying Apple (AAPL) for each sale.

No more.

Today when you visit its website, a promo for the iPhone 3G (”Now Available Online!”) is often the first thing that pops up  — and based on the fourth quarter results the company released Wednesday, you can see why.

The iPhone is still an expensive proposition for AT&T. The kickback to Apple — between $288 and $432 per phone over the life of a 2-year contract, according to various estimates — and the $450 million the company says it spent last quarter on network upgrades to provide high-speed 3G coverage, contributed significantly to the 23% year-to-year decline in AT&T’s quarterly net income (to $2.4 billion from $3.1 billion).

On the other hand, Q4 revenues were up 2.4% (to $31.1 billion) in a tough economic climate thanks to results in the wireless division that CEO Randall Stephenson attributed largely to the iPhone.

“The success of our iPhone 3G launch has driven wireless growth and helped redefine the wireless data space,” he said in a press release.

How did the iPhone do that? Let us count the ways:

1. AT&T has activated 4.3 million iPhone 3Gs since its launch, 1.9 million in Q4 alone — more than double its iPhone activations one year earlier.
2. The average revenue from Phone users is 60% higher than the typical AT&T customer — thanks to that $30 per month data fee. Their heavy use of Web services helped drive AT&T wireless data use up 51.2% year to year, which as reader Jon in Brentwood, Calif., points out is not necessarily a good thing.
3. About 40% of the iPhone activations this quarter were new AT&T customers, either buying their first cellphone or switching from another carrier.
4. The churn rate — the percentage of customers who drop AT&T’s service — among iPhone owners is significantly lower than the rest of the network, sharply reducing marketing costs.

Although iPhone 3G activations were down 21% quarter to quarter — to 1.9 million from 2.4 million after the device’s July launch — they still outpaced Research in Motion’s (RIMM) much hyped BlackBerry Storm. According to one estimate, Verizon (VZ) has activated some 1 million Storms in its first two month of sales.

The rise of the iPhone, like the course of true love, never did run smooth.

Quarterly sales last year varied widely, from a low of 720,000 in June to a high of 6,890,000 in September following the release of the iPhone 3G.

But that’s nothing compared with the weird patterns that emerge from data collected by Net Applications, a Web metrics firm that tracks hits to its clients’ websites on a daily basis — a total of 160 million visitors per month.

The chart above (full size below the fold), created by Hank Vaccaro of Standard Analytics and posted last week on The Mac Observer’s Apple Finance Board, displays Net Applications’ iPhone data for the device’s first 18 months on the market. The first part of the chart is drawn from weekly data; the last part includes daily variations.

With the caveat that this graph represents how frequently iPhone owners are using the Web, not iPhone sales or market share, it still tells us quite a bit about the iPhone’s growth over the past year and a half.

First, by tracking the seven-day moving average (the red line in Vaccaro’s graph), we can see four clear spikes:

1. The initial release in June-July 2007
2. Holiday sales in Dec. 2007
3. The release of the iPhone 3G in July 2008
4. Holiday sales in Dec. 2008

We won’t know how strong sales were in December until Apple (AAPL) releases its quarterly earnings next week (Jan. 21 at 5 p.m. EST), but based on the magnitude of that last bump, they shouldn’t be too shabby. (Citibank’s Richard Gardner on Tuesday cut his 12-month price target for Apple shares from $153 to $132 based in part on what he called “soft 4CQ08 iPhone shipments,” but didn’t say where he got his data.)

And what about the strange saw-tooth pattern in the last part of the chart? That’s created by the daily variations in Web hits. On weekdays, the Internet tends to be dominated by office computers — mostly PCs running Windows. But on weekends, home users take over, and that includes a higher percentage of Macs, iPhones and other non-Windows devices. The variation is striking — as much as 40% in a single day.

But it all smooths out in the long run, as represented in Vaccaro’s chart by a thick black line, and the trend — so far — is an exponential rise.

See also:

• iPod touch use “exploded” Christmas day
• Apple’s Internet share registered strong gains in December
• iPhone Web share hits record 0.48%, up 58% in one month

Below the fold: Vaccaro’s chart, full size:

If it was Steve Jobs’ intention to take the wind out of Macworld’s sails, he’s done a pretty good job.

“Expectations are low,” wrote Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster in a note to clients early Tuesday, one week before the first Macworld Expo keynote since 1997 that won’t be delivered by Apple’s charismatic CEO.  “No significant new products are expected.”

“Fairly modest” is how Kaufmann Bros.’ Shaw Wu described investor expectations for the Expo, which runs from Jan. 5 – 9 in San Francisco and which Apple (AAPL) has already announced will be its last. “Frankly, we would be a little surprised if there is a major announcement, as we believe it would make better sense for Steve Jobs to do so himself at an AAPL event.”

Behind Steve Jobs’ Macworld exit

Both Wu and Munster are looking for Jobs’ keynote stand-in — senior vice-president Phil Schiller — to introduce updated iMacs and redesigned Mac minis — hardly surprises given that both machines are overdue for a refresh.

Munster has not given up on the “new form factor iPhone” — a.k.a. iPhone nano — that he once thought would be announced at the January event. Now he doesn’t expect it to arrive before the end of Apple’s second fiscal quarter, which closes in March.

And he is sticking with his famous prediction — the most optimistic of any mainstream analyst — that Apple will sell 45 million iPhones in calendar 2009. But he reminds clients that that figure is predicated on his belief that Apple will enlarge its iPhone offerings, vastly expand its retail outlets and significantly lower its prices. So far it’s only done one of the three.

Wal-Mart to sell iPhone starting Sunday

Shaw Wu also sees “strong indications” of a lower-cost iPhone and other “larger form factor touchscreen devices” — a.k.a. iPod tablet — later in the year. His sources hint that Apple may introduce a new “consumer device” next week — possibly a jazzed up Apple TV or a superconnected Time Capsule — a.k.a. home server — that would let you grab your files or do backups from anywhere on the Internet.

And Wu hasn’t ruled out the possibility that Phil Schiller will surprise everyone next week with a breakthrough product that nobody is expecting, if only to send the message that Apple is a “much broader and deeper company than one person, even if he/she is a living legend.”

For our part, we haven’t given up on the possibility that Steve Jobs will make a surprise cameo appearance during Schiller’s keynote, if only to show that he’s still kicking — Gizmodo’s latest rumor to the contrary — and still very much in charge.

AT&T (T) on Saturday began offering refurbished iPhones for the lowest price yet seen in the United States:

• $99 for a black 8GB iPhone 3G (refurbished)
• $199 for a black 16 GB iPhone 3G (refurbished)

The price points are not entirely unexpected. For several weeks before Christmas, Apple (AAPL) blogs were buzzing with rumors that Wal-Mart (WMT) would be selling a new version of Apple’s iPhone at the magical $99 price.

But it was not to be. On Friday, Wal-Mart confirmed that starting Sunday, Dec. 28, it will carry the hot-selling phone at nearly 2,500 stores — but starting at $197, not $99.

AT&TS’s $99 iPhones are the same old models, slightly used.

According to the small print on att.com,

Refurbished phones are previously owned devices that have been unused or lightly used and returned during the 30-day trial period. Each refurbished phone is independently quality tested and loaded with the latest software to meet current factory standards. Some refurbished iPhone 3G devices will have minor scratches.

Refurbished iPhone 3G devices carry a warranty of 90 days or more. For details about the warranty on your refurbished iPhone 3G go to www.apple.com/support/oss/.

The catch? The heavily discounted phones come with the usual 2-year contracts, which can cost up to $2,000, depending on the plan.

The sale ends Dec. 31 or when AT&T runs out of stock, whichever comes first. Macworld Expo starts the following week, leading to speculation that AT&T may be using the occasion to clear inventory in advance of new models or new memory configurations.