IPhone 3GS in Japan: Less of a Crowd, More of a Party

From PC World: As the sun set in Tokyo on Thursday evening and the clock counted down toward the launch of the iPhone 3GS on Friday morning, the number of people waiting in front of Softbank Mobile's flagship store in the Omotesando district grew to around 100 and comradery and a party-like atmosphere spread through the crowd.

The line is shorter than last year, when the iPhone first went on sale in Japan, but those queuing appear every bit as eager to get their hands on the new phone. Among those waiting in line, some were already using iPhones and said they would be upgrading and others said they were switching from other phones or rival carriers to get the iPhone 3GS.

The new handset brings several improvements over the previous model, including a speedier experience, longer battery life and a video camera function.

At the head of the queue was Taisuke Fujimoto, who was first to arrive at just before 10 a.m. He was later joined at around lunchtime and the queue grew from there. At 5 p.m. it was around 40 strong but had more than doubled to about 100 people by 7 p.m. It is likely to grow further during the night as Softbank has an event planned in the run-up to start of sales at 7 a.m. on Friday.

As might be expected at any launch event of an Apple product there were a fair few Apple laptops in use and several people were wearing Apple t-shirts, but near the front of the queue the fashion was slightly different. Wearing Android t-shirts were two good-natured members of a group promoting the Google-developed operating system in Japan.

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