“We had our best quarter ever in China,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook earlier today. In its post-earnings conference call for Q2 of fiscal 2013, Cook revealed that Apple sales to Chinese consumers (in the Greater China area, not just the mainland) amounted to $8.8 billion in that period of time, which was up 11 percent year-on-year. In response to a question from a call participant, he denied that Apple had hit a wall in China with the iPhone and iPad. The company also revealed that it plans to double its count of official Apple Stores in Greater China (currently 11).

The Greater China stats cover Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macao, and mainland China. Looking only at the mainland, sales were up eight percent. That’s not so hot when compared to slow growth in the US at a rate of seven percent.

Earlier data from IDC has made clear that 73.2 percent of all mobiles sold in China are smartphones, but the on-the-ground market is far from saturated.

56 percent of Apple’s revenue now comes from non-US markets – representing $24.3 billion in sales. Apple’s total revenues for Q2 hit $43.6 billion, beating analysts’ estimates. But profit nonetheless slipped 18 percent.

Cook inevitably dodged insinuations, notes TechCrunch, about building a budget iPhone, and instead stressed that Apple is selling the older iPhone 4 and 4S in markets like China as a more affordable option for lower-income folks who are trashing their feature phones.

The positive numbers from China come as a relief for Apple after a rough month of public attacks by state media, accusing the company of treating Chinese consumers unfairly when it comes to customer service and repairing devices. Also remember that Android is China’s top smartphone OS, with an estimated 160 million active Android owners right now.

(Source: TechCrunch)

Although obviously the number of phones Apple has returned to Foxconn is not zero (no manufacturer is perfect, after all), and Xing declined to share more precise numbers, he did say that it would be impossible for a factory to have such a high failure rate, and that there were quality control measures in place to prevent that sort of thing from happening.

Apple has still not responded to our request for comment, and is unlikely to do so, but if it does we will update both this and our original post with the company’s response.

(China Business News via Sina Tech)

Because Foxconn reportedly makes only between 1.5 and 2 billion RMB in yearly profit for the iPhones it produces, the company could be looking at around a sixty percent drop in profits this year.

That sounds grim, but it’s worth keeping in mind that as of yet, none of these numbers are official. It’s possible that the 200 RMB per phone estimate is far too high, although it’s also quite possible the phones will cost more than that to fix. It’s also possible that none of this is even true; while it has been widely reported in the Chinese tech press, the Chinese tech press has been known to make stuff up, and neither Apple or Foxconn have confirmed this story. We’ve reached out to Apple for comment and will update this story when the company responds (which we expect to be never).

The scam saw a Wenzhou Apple shop owner turning in what he claimed were 121 iPhone 4S BAND parts (the core of the phone, worth about $476 each) that were broken and asking that they be replaced back in December of 2012. Apple complied, but in January discovered that the parts he submitted as broken were actually counterfeits. They reported this to the shop, which claimed innocence and reported the case to the police.

It took the police several months, but on April 1 they finally arrested one of the shop’s engineers and her boyfriend, who in turn implicated a number of other employees in the scam, all of whom have since also been arrested. Bit in addition to raising questions about Apple’s after-sales service in China and whether it might be too lenient when it comes to returns, it also raises the question of how many of the iPhones out there are real, if scammers can make fake parts so real that it takes even Apple itself a month to notice the difference.

The safest remedy should just be to buy any Apple products you might need new from on of China’s official Apple stores. Sure, the smaller shops in electronics malls sometimes have Apple goods for cheaper, but you know what they say about deals that seem too good to be true…

(Dushi Kuaibao via TechWeb)

In the report, Apple claims that Chinese customers are treated differently than customers in developed countries when getting Apple devices repaired. For example, when replacing an iPhone in England, the report states, customers get an all-new device. But Chinese customers get their old, used back covers (the black or white piece of metal that forms the back part of the phone’s casing) attached to the otherwise-new replacement devices. From the CCTV report:

Isn’t [Apple] here earning Chinese people’s money? Outside China, they will give you a new back cover for free [when they replace your device] but they won’t change Chinese back covers for you. Why are Chinese consumers [treated as] less than others? This is very unfair to Chinese consumers.

Later, the report shows an Apple worker telling a CCTV reporter than back covers are separate, and that getting a new back cover for one’s replaced phone will cost an extra 580 RMB ($92).

CCTV’s complaints weren’t all about back covers either. Among other claims the report also said that Apple’s return and repair policies may violate Chinese regulations in a number of ways. First, retailers are suppose to re-extend the full warranty after a device has been repaired — so that if your phone dies within the 90 day warranty window and you get it repaired, your new 90 day warranty begins the day you pick up the repaired phone — but Apple does not do this. Apple also extends only a one-year warranty for its iPad even though Chinese regulations mandate that many of the product’s components come with two year warranties.

However, the report contains no official statement from Apple. We have contacted Apple China for comment on the matter and will update this post when we hear back.

(CCTV, show transcript via Sina Tech)

A group of Singaporean seniors with their donated phones from the Silverline project.

“Why build new hardware when the world is full of amazing iPhones and Android devices?” With that idea, one civic-minded startup in Singapore is building specialist apps for senior citizens that will then be given to elderly folks on donated phones. Called Project Silverline, it’s launching a crowdfunding campaign today on Indiegogo that’s aiming to raise US$50,000.

Essentially, Silverline is a suite of healthcare and personal safety apps (pictured below) that are made with seniors in mind, with large icons and clear, simple text. Among the five current apps are ‘Connect’, which is a replacement for the phone’s contacts app; ‘Well Being’ provides alarms for things like taking medicine; and the ‘Emergency’ app gives one-tap access to Singapore‘s police or ambulance hotlines. The apps are initially available for iOS and can run on older handsets, such as an iPhone 3GS, so that they work fine on the kind of repurposed devices they hope youngsters will donate in a charitable fashion.

Silverline is being backed by local telco SingTel, which has been accepting old handset donations at stores for several months already, collecting any iPhone 3GS, 4, or 4S that can be given a new lease of life as a communication lifeline for a senior citizen in Singapore with these apps.

Senior safety

The ‘Well Being’ part of the Silverline apps for seniors. Click to enlarge.

With SingTel already on board, and the apps already developed for iOS, I asked Ciaran Lyons from NewtonCircus, the startup running this project, why it’s now taking the crowdfunding route:

Part of the crowdfunding budget will be used to work with some neat external devices – such as battery-powered accelerometers – which provide additional functionality. But so far everything can be installed on your factory-fresh smartphone – though we’d prefer it were second-hand.

Ciaran adds that Silverline has so far clocked up “18 months of research, prototyping and user feedback to make sure that seniors love and benefit from our apps.” In addition to what the suite of apps do already, they’re working on bringing them to Android in future and getting the Silverline apps into the iTunes App Store so that anyone can make use of them. Plus, the startup is testing a personal security app that can detect falls, and has started building games that can detect cognitive decline.

To keep the elderly connected once they’ve received the donated handsets, SingTel is giving 1,000 voice and data plans, good for a whole year, to the phone beneficiaries free of charge. Ciaran says that “the need, even just in Singapore, is far greater than that and it’s growing every year. So we have a lot to do.” But the SingTel site suggests that only 27 old iPhones have been donated so far, so the project is in need of a hardware boost so that some of Singapore’s neediest citizens can have these apps at their disposal.

We’re told that Newton Circus is a startup of 11 people. Though they have received funding from different sources for various initiatives, there’s been no venture capital input as of yet. The team is working with registered charities in the US, UK, Hong Kong, and Australia to create similar phone donation programs there.

Get more info on donating your old iPhones (3GS, 4, 4S only) here, or throw some cash at their new crowdfunding page (which runs for 45 more days). Or do both.

(Image: saransays.com)

By some estimates, India’s middle class consists of 250 to 300 million people. That’s just a few million below China’s middle-income demographic numbers, so Apple simply cannot neglect India. Having only sold about 500,000 iPhones in India last year (and half of those just in the last quarter), that’s slim pickings compared to Apple’s over two million iPhone 5 sales in China alone. Apple’s shown a strong interest in China with Tim Cook going to Beijing last month.

For 2013, according to mobile research firm Canalys, Apple is looking at ramping up its partnerships with Indian distributors like Ingram Micro and Reddington, playing nice with payment plans, and doing more marketing. The company also opened sales of Apple TV, and started up the India iTunes Store this month. Basically, making it much easier for consumers to know that Apple is accessible. But there’s no Apple Store in Mumbai, the country’s biggest city, in contrast to the two in Beijing.

The problem is, Android is cheap for low-end models. And cheap is where the growth is in India. As we noted last week, Indian Android fans love Samsung handsets, but the smaller and cheaper models are more popular. Realistically, India’s middle class numbers indicate nothing, because the purchasing power parity income is around $3,608. A software engineer in India can barely afford an iPhone, which runs well over $800.

By October 2012, Android owns India with over 50 percent of the smartphone market, whereas iOS is at a low five percent.

With rumors of Apple’s cheap iPhone dying out, it’s pretty clear that Apple needs to capture the hearts and minds of luxury-product buying Indians before it’s too late. With Android having already caught up to iOS in terms of features, apps, and power, it’s not looking good.

So, when are we going to see Tim Cook in Mumbai?

(Source: ZDNet)

Specifically, Kantar says Apple hit 23.2 percent of China’s smartphone market in January, up from 18.6 percent in September 2012. But Android saw even more impressive growth, jumping from 65.2 percent of the market in September to 71.5 percent of it in January. The big losers, unsurprisingly, were everyone else. Symbian and Windows Phone both dropped (to 3.5 percent and 1.2 percent, respectively) and other OSes didn’t even register. Here’s a chart of what the market looks like now, according to Kantar:

And here’s a chart that compares the size of each company’s market share in China between September 2012 and January 2013:

Kantar’s report also says that smartphone penetration in China has reached 22 percent, so there is still an awful lot of room for position-shifting as the other four-fifths of the country begin the shift to smartphones.

(via Sina Tech, image source)

Kevin from WalletKit at the 500 Startups Demo Day.

WalletKit was one of the most recent batch of 500 Startups graduates, emerging from the incubator with some funding and renewed conviction about the path ahead. That newest batch of fledgling teams was notable for containing four Indian startups, and WalletKit also counts as one of those.

The co-founder and CEO of WalletKit, which is a platform for creating good-looking cards for Apple’s Passbook or Google Wallet – is Kevin William David (pictured above). He tells us that it was useful being among fellow entrepreneurs from India:

Being around three other Indian startups has been really beneficial. All of us are in the same boat, trying to get customers, meet investors. Some of the Indian founders have done a successful startup and raised money before. Also being a part of a batch with startups from across the globe from various industries and expertise has helped a lot. You get to learn from each one of them on their experiences with each passing day.

WalletKit is now a team of five and, like a number of 500 Startups graduates, has opted to move to San Francisco soon (from Chennai) so as to be closer to the team’s prospective clients.

The service lets businesses make customized virtual boarding passes, tickets, store cards, and coupons for various mobile wallet platforms. Moreover, it gives retailers and other companies a way to analyze the usage and redemption of these kinds of digital tokens. Kevin says that users can make the first 500 Passbook-style passes for free before the startup’s tiered pricing kicks in. With mobile wallets being so fragmented right now across dozens of emerging providers, WalletKit aims to be a constant and affordable way for businesses to serve up these passes to their customers.

Stalking into 500 Startups

WalletKit duo Kevin and Ramakanth.

Kevin and co-founder Ramakanth are both 23 years old and from Chennai, and only graduated from college last year. Getting into 500 Startups was an initial aim of theirs, and Kevin explains that it required some cunning and planning:

We stalked one of the 500 Startups partners at his hotel when he was in India figuring out his hotel location by his tweets. We made a customized pitch book for each partner at 500 along with a poster of their life-size cartoons. Pitched him in his cab all the way to the airport. Three weeks later we were invited to the US to be a part of the current accelerator.

That occured a couple of months before 500 Startups became more firmly entrenched in India by opening the StartupWallah fund to pump US$5 million into startups in the nation. So for future Indian entrants, perhaps they’ll only need to drop an email to 500 Startup venture partner Pankaj Jain to begin their journey into incubation.

The other three Indian startups that toiled along side WalletKit were GazeMetrix, Instamojo, TradeBriefs. In the past, 500 Startups nurtured the Indian team behind Teliportme. Looking outside of India, another one to emerge earlier this month was the clever Chinese-English translation app Waigo, which we reviewed last year.

The next – and fifth – batch is now being recruited by Dave McClure’s incubator, and submissions are open until March 1st. That gives Indian startups one more week to be able to follow WalletKit and other graduates into the program.

The countdown to Demo Day in a photo from January.

That’s the most surprising finding in recent figures from Gartner which show that CoolPad’s Android-based phones have soared to third place in terms of the number of smartphones sold in China at the end of the previous year. CoolPad is one of four Chinese brands in the top six, a phenomenon we first noted last year when Canalys pointed out that domestic phone-makers now account for 60 percent of sales in China.

The CoolPad 8060, one of the phones now outselling the iPhone in China. (Image: ZOL.com.cn)

Going back to the Gartner numbers, China’s smartphone top six now looks like this:

• 1st - Samsung

• 2nd - Lenovo

• 3rd - CoolPad

• 4th - ZTE

• 5th - Huawei

• 6th - Apple

So how did CoolPad phones, made by the relatively tiny China Wireless Technologies (HKG:2369) which used to make PDAs and very unimaginative feature phones, manage to leap past the over-hyped and hallowed iPhone? And that’s despite Apple doubling iPhone sales in the country in 2012. As anyone following the progress of Android in China, you’ll have figured out how already. Android is one big reason, and price is the other. Basically, CoolPad is making a lot of serviceable – if not very trendy – phones for a mere 10 percent of the cost of an iPhone 5. The CoolPad 8060, for example, sells for just 500 RMB (US$80) unlocked, and is a highly affordable gateway to the smartphone world [1].

300 million smartphones to be sold in China in 2013

With smartphone sales at an estimated 189 million in China in 2012, and expected to reach 300 million by the end of 2013, Apple can no longer ignore the entry level market. To do so, some might say, would be to replicate the mistake of decades past that made Apple’s Mac OS into a fringe platform, dwarfed by the widely-used Windows. Apple might have an addressable market at the moment of a few hundred million Chinese middle-to-upper income individuals, but the larger potential market is people who can’t afford to pay out one, two, or three months’ salary for the current iPhone.

Although Apple would never go as low as CoolPad’s price points, there are rumors that Apple is pondering a lower-cost iPhone that could better help it battle Android in China and other important developing markets. Even if Apple aimed at half of the cost of the full iPhone, that would create a smaller iPhone priced at 2,500 RMB in China. That would at least put it closer to more well-specced Android devices in China (not CoolPad’s), such as the Xiaomi Mi2. The young phone-maker Xiaomi sold 7.19 million of its Android-powered phones in 2012, mostly to Chinese consumers.

In some ways, Xiaomi is the cool equivalent of CoolPad. While Xiaomi phones seem to be sold mostly to younger people, with 70 percent of them sold online, CoolPads are sold to a wider – and maybe less affluent – range of consumers from electronics retailers such as Gome and Suning.

CoolPad, then, represents the huge amount of people in China who’re ditching Nokia and feature phones, and jumping onto the cheapest thing that lets them play Temple Run 2. Apple needs to decide whether it wants to bring Xiaomi and CoolPad buyers closer to its price range, or forever push them – all half a billion of them – out of its exclusive club.

How was your week? Fun week? Big week? As usual our week was pretty busy trying to stay on top of all the latest tech happenings around the Asia region. And for your reading pleasure, we’ve put together of some our favorite picks from the past seven days. Read on for more.

Steven’s pick: Apple Sees iPhone Sales Double in China

With so many analysts recently putting the bull in bullish, there was quite a reality check from Apple’s newest financials. The numbers revealed that the iPhone is still seeing good growth in the country, with double the number sold in 2012 compared to 2011.

Andrew’s pick: China’s Xiaomi Aims its MiTalk Messaging App at Southeast Asia, Japan, and Korea

The chat app war is getting interesting, and I can’t help but wonder how Xiaomi’s MiTalk will fare in this competitive market. It will be tough for the Chinese handset maker since all the other apps have a significant head start. But still, I think Xiaomi can give them a run for their money. Let’s see.

Willis’ pick: Revenue First

Revenue first. Though the concept isn’t quite true for every startup, I think it’s a refreshing angle to communicate the brutal truth about how hard it is to build a startup in Asia. The article helps to pull back entrepreneurs to reality, so they don’t get mesmerized by Silicon Valley magic. Asia ain’t like the Valley and it’s beautiful in its own ways. Needless to say, there’s lots of growth in Asia too.

Minh’s pick: Apple Indonesia Investment Confirmed, Jakarta Store and Online Sales Coming Soon

An Apple Store in Indonesia? How awesome is that? After all, it’s the largest Muslim country in the world and the most populated country in Southeast Asia. This only reinforces my thinking that Indonesia is on fire right now. With Tim Cook wanting to step up Apple’s market in China, it makes sense that Indonesia is also on his list.

Emily’s pick: Growing Faster than Facebook and Twitter: Key Highlights for Japan’s Line App [Infographic]

Japan’s popular Line app has taken Asia by storm. This week NHN Japan released an infographic (complete with their iconic characters) that confirmed their success in countries like Thailand, Taiwan, and Japan. It is also interesting to know that its amazing growth rate is about three times faster than that of Facebook and Twitter!

Rick’s pick: China Train Ticket Site Cost Nearly $100 Million, Seems to Be Harassing Programmers, And Might Be Broken Again

I’m not really that interested in the continued failings of the Railway Ministry’s miserable website — we’re sort of getting used to that. But I did find it really crazy that one plugin developer in Beijing was visited by ‘strange men’ and asked to take it offline. That’s harsh.

Charlie’s pick: Xiaomi Box Gets Regulatory Approval, Can Go on Sale

I’ve said before that I’m a big fan of Xiaomi’s courageous set-top box idea. I’m not sure this newly-partnered (and, probably, neutered) version of the device is going to set the world on fire, but it’s something that’s definitely worth keeping an eye on!

Apple said in total, it saw $7.3 billion in total revenue in China during the quarter. Tim Cook also said that the company — here’s a no-brainer — plans to open more Apple stores in the country:

I’m very happy with how things are going [with China...] It’s clear there’s a lot of potential there.

In fact, China has become such an important region to Apple that it has been split off from Apple’s Asia-Pacific operating segment, and made into a separate Chinese operating segment that includes the mainland, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. This is mostly a corporate structural change, so it won’t have an impact on Apple’s day-to-day customers in China, but it does reflect the company’s increased focus on China and Chinese-speaking markets.

KakaoTalk, South Korea’s number one messaging app, has released new stickers for the Vietnamese market this week. With Vietnamese New Year just around the corner, the stickers feature classic Tet images. The stickers will be especially welcome in a market where no other messaging apps – such as WeChat or Line – provide such Vietnamese specific imagery.

The move is part of KakaoTalk’s push into the mobile-oriented Vietnamese market. The messaging app market in Vietnam is still growing, and there is no clear dominant platform so this is a big opportunity for KakaoTalk. In South Korea, KakaoTalk has over 90 percent of the market and “KaTalk Me” is a common colloquialism. Koreans no longer say “Text Me”, as paying for SMS seems too passé.

Currently KakaoTalk’s Vietnamese userbase is over 150,000 people. KakaoTalk is relatively new compared to services like Whatsapp, Viber, and WeChat. But the startup has taken a shine to Vietnam, making it the third country outside of Korea that has a dedicated KakaoTalk team after Japan and Indonesia. Armed with Vietnamese-specific stickers for the lunar new year, the battle is on.

KakaoTalk’s worldwide user numbers today exceed 72 million.

We all know that China is important to Apple (even if you didn’t know it already, Tim Cook’s recent visit to China surely must have driven it home). It’s becoming Apple’s biggest market, but with average salaries still far below those of most Western countries, Apple needs to do more if it wants average Chinese people buying its products. To that end, it recently rolled out an installment payment plan and there are rumors that the company is considering making a low-cost smartphone in part to help capture a bigger slice of the Chinese smartphone market. The former is a great idea, and the latter is a terrible one. Here’s why:

A cheap smartphone ruins Apple’s brand image. Even more than in the west, Apple products are a luxury item and a status symbol in China. Part of the fun of buying the newest iPhone is showing it off on the street, and posting pictures of it to your weibo account. If every Li, Zhou, and Wang on the street is also carrying an Apple phone, showing off your own iPhone is going to be a lot less fun. There’s a reason Louis Vuitton doesn’t offer low-cost handbags, and that’s the reason why Apple won’t market a low-cost smartphone in China.

The only reason to sell one would be if Apple wants to abandon its slice of the luxury market (i.e., the customers it has in China now) in hopes of capturing a bigger slice of the low-cost market. But Apple probably doesn’t want to do that because…

Apple can’t compete and keep the margins it wants in the low cost market. Apple makes a ridiculous amount of profit off of its mobile devices. Seriously, the margins are so huge they border on offensive. But if Apple were to go after the low-cost market, it would have to settle for the same razor-thin profit margins and selling-at-cost because everyone else in the market is doing that. Xiaomi, for example, offers a pretty convincing competitor to the current iPhone at less than half its price. I’ve owned both phones, and I can honestly say that the only place I noticed a difference was in the camera (the Xiaomi’s camera is definitely worse).

If Apple were to start selling low-cost smartphones, though, it would be competing with Xiaomi, Meizu, and all the other low-cost, high-performance smartphones head to head. To offer similar performance at the same price points as those phones, Apple would have to slash its own profits. Even if the company was willing to do that (which I doubt), it would still have to compete with some pretty convincing homegrown alternatives even as its status as a luxury brand began to fade and the “cool factor” started to wear off. If the iPhone costs $700, Apple has nothing to fear from Xiaomi. But I think a $300 iPhone would face very serious challenges from a number of local competitors, and given the razor-thin margins, I don’t think any of it would be worth the effort.

Plus, adding more iPhone models would hurt Apple’s media domination. When an Apple mobile product launches in China it’s an event, and not just because some of the launches seem to end with violence. True, Apple’s marketing and media manipulation skills are incredible, but part of the reason for this is simply that Apple doesn’t release products that often. The more phone models it offers, the less exciting each new launch is. And that means less discussion on social media (a new Apple product now can dominate Sina Weibo’s trending topics list for days), less discussion in regular media (remember this?), and ultimately less overall interest.

I could be wrong of course (it wouldn’t be the first time), but if Apple launches a cheap smartphone in China I will be very surprised. Selling old models at reduced prices is one thing — that just reinforces that the newest model is the status symbol everyone should want — but selling a new model at a low price is quite another. Could it happen? Sure. But will it? No, it almost certainly won’t.

There has been a lot of discussion in the tech media recently following a Wall Street Journal story that suggested Apple had halved its order for iPhone 5s from supplier Foxconn in response to declining demand for the handset. The predictable backlash in the tech media was almost immediate. The truth is that we’ll have to wait for Apple’s sales numbers to be sure of the truth, but economic reports from China’s Henan province may point to a slight decline in the growth in demand for Apple iPhones. What the Henan data doesn’t point to is a huge cut in Apple’s iPhone orders.

Henan province is the home of one of Foxconn’s major manufacturing centers, and Foxconn Henan is responsible for producing more than half of the iPhones on the market today. Given that, Foxconn’s impact on Henan’s economy is tremendous, and the company accounts for more than 56 percent of the province’s total imports and exports. Recently-released economic data shows strong growth in the province and suggests Foxconn and its subsidiaries did nearly $3 billion in import/export business over the course of 2012.

But it also suggests that growth in demand for iPhones may be slowing. In 2011, phone exports from the province grew at a rate of 310 percent, but in 2012 that rate dropped to 251 percent. Is this evidence of decreased demand for the iPhone 5? No. But since Foxconn accounts for such a gigantic percentage of the province’s total exports, it could suggest that perhaps Apple’s consumer base is not growing as quickly as it once was. If true, that could ultimately lead to a reduction in orders. But I’ve seen nothing that substantiates the claims that Apple cut its orders in half. Since that order was reportedly given around a month ago in early to mid December, it certainly would have had some impact on Henan’s economic numbers for the year.

Nor have there been, as far as I’m aware, reports of mass layoffs at Foxconn or other Apple suppliers in December, which would certainly be likely in the event that Apple halved orders on one of Foxconn’s biggest manufacturing lines.

So, while I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that demand for iPhones has dropped slightly when Apple does release its own numbers, I rather doubt we’ll be seeing anything so dramatic as a 50 percent reduction. If that had happened, Apple would likely be unable to stop news of the aftershocks from leaking out from its China suppliers.

(China Business News via Sina Tech)

Readers may remember that I was very enthusiastic about Japanese finance application Zaim. And while I’m pretty happy with that app, I was curious to come across a Korean-made alternative called M-Story.

From Korean developer ParkPill, the iOS app boasts one interesting feature that caught my attention in particular, that being the ability to export all your data to a CSV file, which can then be used in your preferred spreadsheet program (Excel, Numbers, or Google Spreadsheets).

In comparison to Zaim, M-Story doesn’t require you to add too much information. It just asks you to specify what you bought and how much you paid for it. While M-Story has been around for a while, it recently added iCloud backup and Retina display support as well, both big pluses. There’s a lock feature to ensure your finances are kept private, which I suppose would come in handy to anyone who doesn’t implement iOS’s normal lock screen ¹.

Unlike Zaim, M-Story is a paid application for iPhone and iPad. But at just 99 cents, it still looks to be a bargain. I recommend you give it a try and let us know what you think. I’m looking forward to giving it a test run over the next few weeks.

The folks over at Japanese tech blog AppBank have created a short video demo which you can check out below. The interface here is in Japanese, but the app comes in English too.

If you enjoy slashy, swipy smartphones games like Cut the Rope and Fruit Ninja, you might also like a fun new iOS title from Russia’s Anton Roshchine Studio called To Bee or Not to Bear.

The game pits busy builder bees against hungry, destructive bears who fly on screen tethered to firehoses trying to steal honey from your hive. Your job is to help out the bees by cutting loose the bears with a swipe of your finger so they fall to the ground.

The game is good fun, although the difficulty level is higher than I expected for such a cutesy title. Occasionally I found that a single level can be frustratingly difficult, as it can be amazingly tricky to break out of the equilibrium of bees building and bears stealing. The artwork is pretty solid though, and overall its an enjoyable game.

AR Studio is apparently hoping to attract some of the Chinese market, going so far as to put its homepage’s default navigation menu Chinese. The folks over at Chinese tech blog Technode astutely point out that since Cut the Rope (from Russian developer Zeptolab) found China to be its biggest market, that perhaps AR Studio has its eyes on a similar prize. The app itself has multiple language options, including English and Chinese.

Currently the iPhone version of the game is available on the app store for 99 cents and there’s a HD version available for iPad for $2.99. You can check out a video demo of gameplay below, as well as screenshots.

Thailand-based game studio Pocket Playlab has recently released a fun puzzle game for iPhone called Lost Cubes. The folks over at Kotaku rightfully points out that the title is pretty much a clone of Flow Free, in that you have to connect multiple cube pairs on a grid without connecting lines crossing one another. So if you like that puzzle game, you’ll be sure to like this as well.

I’ve been giving it a light trial run over the past couple of days, and Lost Cubes is a fun casual title. At times it’s a little bit too casual, as the early stages are pretty easy. But eventually the puzzles get a little bit trickier, and require a little bit of creative thinking in order to solve them.

The level select is in the style of Angry Birds, as is the scoring system which awards you one, two, or three stars based on your point total for that round. And while the folks at Pocket Playlab aren’t going to win any points for originality in game design, the artwork for Lost Cubes is pretty solid as you can see the from trailer and screenshots below.

I understand that Lost Cubes is the studio’s initial effort at creating a first party title. It has previously worked on third party games, and you can browse its portfolio here.

The game is free to play, but is supported by ads. Pocket Playlab boasts that in the first 24 hours after its release that more than a million levels were played on Lost Cubes. It’s doing respectably well in the US app store, ranked fourth in the family category and fifth among puzzle games.

If you’d like to check it out for yourself, you can download it now over on the app store.

Well, I guess it was only a matter of time before this happened. Korean pop star PSY has been a phenomenon over the past year for his infectious Gangnam Style hit song, but now he’s getting the eight-bit treatment in a new iPhone game called Gangnam Style City.

The game is a side-scrolling platformer where you assume the role of the Korean rapper as he horse-dances across city rooftops. I’m not sure how exactly the game developer would account for PSY’s sudden interest in Parkour, but there it is. It’s a very simple but fun game where PSY has to collect coins and items, and avoid falling into gaps between buildings. He can also get items like bikes, cars, and planes to drive in too – although admittedly that’s not nearly as fun as horse dancing.

In addition to the retro graphics, the game comes complete with an ‘eight-bit’ version of the Gangnam Style song too which plays in the background ¹.

The new mobile title is available for free over on the app store for a limited time. I do recommend giving it a try, although if the price goes up to more than a buck or two, I’d take a pass on it. Gangnam Style City was just released over the weekend by Argentinian developer Voon, and it’s currently ranked in the top ten in the music category in 17 countries, including Italy and France (number one), as well as South Korea (at number three).

As the new year is almost upon us, most of us are likely pondering some resolutions for 2013. For those of you looking to quit smoking this year, there’s a new application from Singapore-based Bitsmedia which could help you meet that challenge.

Its new app Quit Pro takes an analytical approach to kicking your habit, by recording not only when you smoke, but also where you smoked, as well as the feelings or events that brought on the craving (see screenshots below). There are options for quitting gradually, as well as cold turkey [1], so you can customize it to whichever looks achievable for you.

You can also track the length of time that you have managed to stay quit, and also the amount of money you’ve saved, and how it has affected your life expectancy. There’s an aspect of encouragement too, as the app comes with 200 motivational quotes from different health organizations.

I’m a big fan of these life-quantifying apps [2], and Quit Pro comes with some fun graphical features that help you track your habit.

Some of you may remember Bitsmedia as the same app developer behind the very popular Muslim Pro app, which we mentioned a few times last year. After a brief stint at Google, founder Erwan Macé has decided to refocus on his app development. Muslim Pro has over three million downloads on iOS and Android to date, and he says it is generating “decent revenues.” He says that his approach to development is very lean, as it’s mostly himself working as a one-man indie developer with some help from freelancers on occasion.

Erwan notes that he quit smoking 10 years ago using a similar Symbian application, and he thought that the same process could work for others. But with new tracking features, he says that Quit Pro is something entirely new.

Like Muslim Pro, Quit Pro is a freemium app that offers some additional content if you choose to upgrade. Admirably, Erwan is putting five percent back towards cancer research, and so if you’re looking for a reason to choose this over other smoking apps, I think that’s as good a reason as any. You can get it for free over on the app store.

With Vietnam having more than 130 million mobiles in a country of 90 million and growth projected at five percent year-on-year, what’s the mobile OS breakdown? When you look at the stats from Ericsson’s Mobility Report a few months back, Vietnam seems to be a bit of an anomaly in the region. Android and iOS are equally faced off in terms of market share, but Symbian still rules. Most of the folks you see on the street are carrying the usual durable Nokia phones.

I think this is odd when you consider Nokia’s steady decline since the rise of more modern smartphone platforms, but the predominance of Symbian makes sense in a country that is still mostly rural and still developing its own internet culture. More than 60 percent of the population is outside of the cities, after all. Nokia has recognized this and started plans to build its first factory in Vietnam. But this might be too late without a powerful and attractive smartphone OS of its own. Nokia is far from having a modern ecosystem that facilitates app markets. That’s essentially what has made Android and iOS phones so appealing to consumers around the world – and increasingly in Vietnam too.

Android and iOS are head-to-head at 21 percent each in the overall mobile OS share. This will most likely trend in the direction of Android as its phones are getting cheaper, more powerful, and more accessible. Every major electronics store in Vietnam carries Android phones. iPhones, on the other hand, are found mainly in official Apple resellers and are always pricey. Although older models like the iPhone 3GS and 4 are getting cheaper, products like the iPhone 5 are expensive to the point of being inaccessible to the vast majority of people. For Apple fans, new is more appealing than old. Why would I buy an old iPhone if I can get a new Android-powered Samsung for the same price or less? In Vietnam, the iPhone5 so far has been a loser.

With Blackberry OS at six percent and the new Windows Phone at two percent, their impact won’t be felt until late 2013, by which time RIM will have BB10 ready to roll. Both RIM and Microsoft are intent on cultivating a huge app ecosystem for their platforms but I’m still waiting to see if they can actually execute. Early 2013 will clearly be a battle between Symbian, iOS, and Android. A battle that, like in China, Android is bound to win.

There have been lots of great applications to emerge from Japan over the past year. And while I can’t claim to have that many of them, I have tried quite a few. I thought I’d share five of my favorites for iOS [1], though I’d be very curious to hear which ones you liked as well. Of course, I won’t go so far as to say these are the best, but I certainly got lots of use and enjoyment from them in the past year.

5. Ninja Farm

I’m really not sure why I enjoyed this game so much. I usually despise farming games. But like most people, I do have a soft spot for ninjas ever since Shinobi on the Sega Master System. The idea of planting and harvesting ninjas is a thoroughly ridiculous idea, but somehow the process of leveling up your army and taking them into battle against increasingly difficult enemies made for a game that I didn’t want to stop playing (see my original article here).

The title was made by the CyberAgent’s Gamewave, and if you’d like to check it out, you can find it in the app store.

4. Line Camera

I confess, this isn’t an application that I use a lot, but I am impressed with the photo decoration functions – perhaps more than any other ‘photo-deco’ app I’ve seen to date. Line Camera got off to a scorching start this past summer, as NHN Japan boasted that it reached the 10 million user mark three times faster than Instagram did. It now claims over 17 million users in 210 countries around the world.

In retrospect, looking at the success of the other apps that NHN Japan has distributed via its chat platform, that’s probably not entirely due to the merits of the app alone. But I still think it’s pretty sharp. Check it out over on the app store.

As with many other successful applications, Line Camera has seen imitators spring up as well, most notably (and perhaps shamefully) this crappy Chinese rip-off which has since been renamed.

3. Rage of Bahamut

Perhaps the most successful app or game to come out of Japan in the past year is Cygame’s Rage of Bahamut on DeNA’s Mobage platform. The card battle title has enjoyed huge popularity not just at home but abroad as well, proving that there is some potential for card battle games outside Japan. The game has ranked high on top grossing charts (particularly on Android) and DeNA recently bought a 20 percent stake in Cygames, showing just how much confidence it has in the game publisher.

If you haven’t yet tried it, check it out now on the app store. It’s also available on Google Play for those of you rocking Android.

2. Zaim

This personal finance app is still in the growing stages, but it’s still one of the few apps that I use on a daily basis (see my previous article on Zaim here). You can input your expenses in your preferred currency and according to a range of categories, and pace yourself according to a pre-set monthly budget in each category. Zaim recently pushed its version 2.0 which added support for different types of payment like wallet, credit card, or Pasmo card.

Ideally I’d like to see some sort of data export function in the future for Zaim, although now that I think about it, that sort of thing might be a possibility for a premium version in the future.

Readers may recall that Cookpad recently invested in Zaim to the tune of $512,000, and web and PC versions of Zaim are on the way. You can get Zaim from the app store and give it a try.

1. Battle Cats

I discovered this game just a month back, but I haven’t really put it down for very long since then. It’s a fun tower defense game which pits you and an army of cats against an assortment of enemies. One of the coolest things about Battle Cats is its sense of humor, which rather than getting lost in translation, is actually enhanced in an All-your-base manner, as you can see below from the enemy descriptions. Overall, this game hasn’t been very popular, but I still enjoy the hell out of it, and it’s always making me laugh.

I tried to reach the game’s developer Ponos, in the hopes of interviewing someone at company about Battle Cats – but regretably, they appear less adept at marketing than game development.

If you’d like to try it out, you can get it over in the app store for iPhone or iPad.

Telkomsel was the first carrier to open online pre-orders in Indonesia, and although its carrier packages are the most expensive in the country, the company was still able to sell out its 2,000 handsets during pre-orders. Today’s launch in Gandaria City mall was mostly for the 300 invited customers who had bought the phones online:

XL Axiata was the only carrier that did not start online pre-orders for the iPhone 5, instead the company held its ‘Antri Like a King’ program which promised comforts and conveniences for its queuing customers at two malls – Central Park and Senayan City. Interestingly, XL Axiata offered generous discounts of 50 percent and IDR 1.5 million ($156) to the first 50 and 100 customers respectively at each mall. XL Axiata might be the carrier that managed to gather the largest crowd:

Queue at Senayan City Mall

Crowd that are waiting for the Central Park Mall to open

Indosat was the only carrier that held its launch away from any malls, focusing on two Seven Eleven stores in Jakarta. Indonesia’s Seven Elevens are popular among teenagers as late-night hang-out places, and the two selected places became more crowded particularly during midnight. Indosat’s iPhone 5 launch offered discounts between IDR 1 million ($104) to IDR 2 million ($208), but still that wasn’t enough to spark the kind of big-bang launch seen by its two rivals.

On the other hand, Indosat also held a fun offline contest to win an iPhone 5, in conjunction with e-commerce store Lazada Indonesia, at midnight at the fX Mall. After several grueling questions for the eleven [1] on the quiz panel – about Apple mainly, which included naming the third founder besides Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak; it was even asked which is the Japanese meat dish that Steve Jobs enjoyed even though he was a vegetarian – one person was able to consistently dominate and win the contest, he was Handoko Tjung. He was one of the four that was chosen by us on Wednesday (in this post) to go into the quiz.

This morning, the winner tweeted this:

I JUST WON MYSELF A NEW IPHONE 5!!! WOOHOOOOOOOOOO!!! Thanks @lazadaid @indosat and @techinasia for the chance! twitter.com/handokotjung/s…

— Handoko Tjung (@handokotjung) December 13, 2012

Handoko explained that the iPhone 5 he won is his first iPhone ever. Although he used a Blackberry handset, he is a big admirer of Apple and had watched several documentaries about the company and Jobs. That gave him a huge advantage when answering the questions in the contest. Handoko was chosen by us for his comment below. Congratulations man!

Hi I’m @handokotjung , and I want that iPhone 5 as an early christmas present, I’ve never got one from santa in the past 26 year. I think I’ve always been in the naughty list.

WELL GUESS WHAT SANTA? SCREW YOU AND YOUR NAUGHTY or NICE LIST!
I’ll get my own christmas present!

Ehm.

That being said, that retina display is pretty slick. Gimme gimme gimme.

[Sources: Kompas Tekno #1, #2 #3, and liputan6, pictures too]

If you’re not interested in the iPhone, today might be a good day to take a break from Chinese tech sites. As of 5 AM, here’s what Sina Tech’s mobile news portal’s domestic news section looks like. You don’t need to be able to read Chinese to figure out the theme here:

Interestingly, although China Telecom and China Unicom hosted midnight launches at various locations across the city, the phone actually isn’t available directly from Apple yet, as Apple Stores are closed and the company’s China website won’t begin selling the handsets until 7 A.M.

Of course, for plenty of Chinese Apple fans, the iPhone 5 is old news, as gray-market imports from the US and Hong Kong have been available in China for months already. The release of the official version should knock gray market import prices down a peg or two, but importers will still be able to sell them at a profit because the taxes China levies on the official version still makes it cheaper to purchase in Hong Kong or the US than it is in China.

[Image via Sina Tech]

In browsing the top app charts for Japan, I stumbled across an unusual application called ‘Big or Small.’ Currently the eighth most popular free app, it’s is a quiz game which tests your ability to guess whether a ladies… um… assets are… well, big or small — just by looking at their face. So in the interests of science, I took the app for a test run.

The application features photos of over 400 women, grouped into different categories like celebrity, cosplay, gyaru, and others. I have no idea how the application’s publisher collected these photos, but I’m willing to bet that most of these girls didn’t sign up for this. There isn’t any nudity involved here, but be warned that some of the banner ads are a little risqué.

In any case, my brief experience with the app didn’t do much but prove that I’m really not very good at this type of classification exercise (scoring only 5/10 correct, see below) — although it isn’t for lack of paying attention back during my school days.

I’m not certain that such an app will have a very long life in the app store, so if you’d like to test it out, download it while you can (note: it’s in Japanese). The idea of such a game will likely be offensive to many outside Japan I expect. But I’ll leave that to you to decide. Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

A short time from now, at 12noon local time, Indonesian e-commerce store Multiply will start its iPhone 5 pre-orders. The site will sell two XL Axiata bundled versions of the handset – the 16GB and 32GB. Below are the pricing schemes for three of iPhone 5 packages so far (in rupiah, then in dollar):

The total number of new iPhones available for pre-order is a mere 50 – yes, fifty – with more 16GB units than 32GB ones available. With the fact that Telkomsel’s pricier packages sold out its stock of 2,000 phones for pre-order in the last five days, then Multiply’s mere 50 units should sell out very fast. The e-commerce site will offer more next week under a different offer. Buyers can expect to receive the phones on December 14th – when the iPhone 5 officially launches in Indonesia and a few other countries.

XL Axiata hasn’t started its own online pre-orders, nor has it revealed the iPhone 5 pricing scheme. The carrier will be holding its offline program, dubbed Antri Like a King, on December 14th instead. So Multiply’s offer is the first XL Axiata bundled package to be sold in Indonesia.

For more information and to pre-order the phones, you can check here.

Apple’s latest handset, the iPhone 5 is set to be available on December 14th in Indonesia. Two operator partners – Telkomsel and Indosat XL Axiata have made their first move to sell the handset in the country, with the former becoming the first operator partner to open online pre-orders today. Telkomsel is dishing out the following bundling prices for the handsets. Interestingly, the bundling package is only available for the company’s Halo card users, and not for other Telkomsel SIM cards like Simpati and As.

We also have the converted rate for the iPhone 5:

Users would need to make a down-payment of IDR 500,000 ($52) at the pre-order registration process. Telkomsel believes that even in a market dominated by Blackberry, the iPhone 5 will be a big hit.

Customers who have pre-ordered their iPhones can pick up the gadgets at a few pick-up points located in Jakarta, Bandung, and Surabaya between December 14th to 16th. The telco operator wants to give its customers the convenience of reserving the phones online and picking the phones up without the hassle of queueing in lines because of the high demand.

Telkomsel plans to offer pre-paid bundling packages for Simpati users in the near future. For registration and more information, you can check here.

In the meantime, another mobile operator, XL Axiata, will also be starting iPhone 5 sales on December 14th at Xplor Centers in Central Park and Senayan City. The company promises comfort for customers during the queuing process with its ‘Antri Like a King’ program (antri means “queue”). The comforts XL Axiata promise include the ability for queuers to step out to buy food and take a walk without losing their place in the queue. The company even offers massages for tired customers at the event. You can register and check more information about it here.

This morning, China Mobile CEO Li Yue announced that the telecom provider is planning to launch its own line of branded mobile phones. Li also said that the company will “definitely” continue and strengthen its work on a partnership with Apple to officially sell the iPhone. At present, China Mobile does not sell phones of its own, and it is China’s only major telecom provider not to offer the iPhone (although many China Mobile users do use jailbroken iPhones on the company’s 2G network).

If you’re excited about the Apple news, don’t be: Li’s statement is pretty vague and the company has previously said quite clearly that it won’t offer the iPhone until 2014. The news about a China Mobile-branded line of phones is more interesting, though. Li asserted that this would not harm competition in the mobile space and that China Mobile would pursue a “Wal-Mart” model of sorts, selling its own phones alongside the handsets of other brands in its stores.

That announcement, too, is a bit premature, as Li said the company is ramping up its plans but is still in negotiations with supplier factories. That process takes time, as does design, manufacturing, and marketing, so I wouldn’t expect to see China Mobile handsets sitting on store shelves any time too soon.

It’s also interesting that China Mobile is making a move into hardware around the same time as SARFT is making a move into China Mobile’s territory: telecommunications services. This is almost certainly a coincidence, but it’s a coincidence I think is worth noting. It will be interesting to see if any of China’s other telecom providers are considering similar approaches.

[via TechWeb]

Even with Android dominating, the Apple brand still strikes a chord with the Vietnamese consumer | photo via http://biz.cafef.vn/

The iPhone5 will soon hit Apple Stores and authorized resellers in 54 countries across the world. In Asia, that includes:

• South Korea (Dec 7)
• Indonesia (Dec 14)
• Malaysia (Dec 14)
• Philippines (Dec 14)
• Taiwan (Dec 14)
• China (Dec 14)
• and finally, Vietnam (Dec 21)

Of course in Vietnam, like most other countries with devout Apple fans, this isn’t big news. Since Tim Cook announced the iPhone 5 on September 12th the handsets were easily available for purchase at local smartphone shops and resellers. The first problem was making sure that the nano-sim was properly shaved and cut to fit the iPhone 5’s reduced size SIM slot. The final barrier was getting telecom service on the phone. Yesterday’s announcement now reassures Apple fans that Viettel, Mobifone, and other services will soon offer iPhone5 service.

With Android handsets cheaper and more widespread, and no official Apple Store on Vietnamese soil, Android has quickly climbed to the top of the Vietnamese smartphone market. With the iPhone 5 putting Apple back on top of the smartphone world, will it do the same in Vietnam?

The culture around “Vietnam’s Apple” closely parallels China’s bootlegging culture where Chinese smartphone suppliers also got their hands on the iPhone 5 well before the latest announcement. After the phone was officially announced, China Unicom’s pre-orders have hit over 100,000 on just the first day of availability. Vietnam will certainly be following this sort of trend.

Two of Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) newest gadgets have emerged from the Kafkaesque trial of China’s tech regulators to hit stores in early December. Apple has just confirmed that the iPad mini and the updated iPad will go on sale in China on December 7th (Friday), followed by the iPhone 5 a week later on December 14th.

But only the wifi versions of the fourth-gen iPad and the brand-new iPad Mini will be coming to China next week, resulting in an even longer wait for those who’d like to use them on 3G in the country.

As is the new custom, Apple is waging war on scalpers with its reservation system. Tonight’s announcement points out:

Reservation requests will be accepted daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. [local time] beginning Thursday, December 6 for pick up the following day.

The same will apply for the iPhone 5 a week later. But right now, Apple hasn’t updated its mainland China site, which is still touting the iPhone 4S.

Just last night, my colleague Charlie pointed out that the iPhone 5 had been issued its regulatory permit from MIIT, so its arrival next month is no surprise.

In Apple’s most recent earnings call, CEO Tim Cook pointed out that China now accounts for 15 percent of Apple’s sales, where it saw iPad shipments up 45 percent for Greater China, while iPhone sales were up 38 percent.

[Source: Engadget Mobile]

Eagle-eyed reporters at TechWeb today have spotted some good news for Apple fans in China: the iPhone 5 has finally received its network permits from MIIT. Permits were issued for both the China Telecom and China Unicom versions of the phone, which means that both versions of the handset should go on sale shortly.

Apple’s official China site still hasn’t announced a launch date, but the network permits are generally the last major regulatory hurdle between a wireless device and commercial release in China. TechWeb reporters spotted the permits on MIIT’s official site, and although it can be difficult to be certain what device the permits refer to because they only list model numbers, it seems pretty clear in this case that the iPhone 5 is the device in question.

It seems likely now that the phone will be released in December, which is more or less on par for Apple’s usual three-month delay when releasing wireless products in China. The iPhone 5 was announced and launched for most of the world back in September, but as with all Apple devices, Chinese Apple fans have had to wait while government bureaus run the devices through the usual round of tests before issuing it a network permit — or just buy a gray-market import from the US or Hong Kong.

Despite the widespread availability of the gray-market handsets, official iPhones are so popular that the last time Apple launched one here, it was forced to shut down its Beijing flagship store because of rioting phone scalpers fighting in the long overnight line to get the phones. Will the next iPhone launch in China be as contentious — and violent — as the last one was? Hopefully not, but you never know. Either way, we don’t recommend getting in any overnight lines for the phone before the launch, as Apple will likely continue its recent policy of making customers reserve the phones online before picking them up in stores to avoid violence.

[via TechWeb]

We recently wrote about Mr. Ninja, a fun iPhone game from Japanese developer Ponos. That game was fun for casual play, and for the first time really put Ponus on our radar as a developer to watch. And over the past couple of days I’ve taken a closer look at some of their games, most notably Battle Cats, which was released for iPhone and iPad just over a week ago.

The title is a tower defense game, which might initially turn you off with its bad English text and weird backstory intro. But if you can get past that minor flaw, you’ll be rewarded. You take your cat army into battle against the enemy, defending your own tower and trying to destroy theirs. You have different cats with different abilities that you can send into battle, as well as a canon mounted on your castle which you can fire at enemies when it is recharged.

Overall, I really like the game mechanics of Battle Cats. I’m a big fan of tower defense games in general, but this one sort of reminds me of Age of Empires – or dare I say chess – in how you can put stronger defensive cats up front and try to follow up with more offensive cats from the back. Tempo also comes into play as you can time your attacks to coincide with lapses in the enemies attacking wave.

Each round of the game takes place in a different region of Japan, so if you can’t beat one round, you can back track and re-do an earlier round to earn XP and upgrade your army. Alternatively, you can pay to continue or buy more energy so you don’t have to wait to play more rounds. The in-app purchases are smartly implemented, and so far they haven’t crippled the game for me in any way [1].

Battle Cats is currently doing well in the ‘strategy’ and ‘simulation’ categories in the Japanese app store, but it hasn’t really made an impact anywhere else yet. I know it’s still early in the lifespan of this game, but I think that with some polishing, this game could have some serious potential to be a global hit. It’s the most fun I’ve had on an iPad since Infinity Blade. Battle Cats fits right in that category of ‘cute/wacky Japan’ that follows in the bizarre tradition of Nyan Cat, and the characters are just as marketable as those in Angry Birds [2].

Give it a try and let me know what you think. You can download it for free over in the App Store. Selfish update: If you want to kickstart your game with an invite code, mine is yg2t0!

invoking the god cat, similar to Angry Birds’ Mighty Eagle

A few weeks back we told you about Japan-based Bitcellar, whose FxCamera for Android had past the impressive milestone of 20 million downloads. At that point we also learned that the company had an iPhone version in the works, and now finally it has been released in the App Store. The Android version originally launched back in mid 2009, so the iOS version has been a long time coming.

Interestingly, the iOS version includes what appears to be a new function. There’s now a ‘voice picture’ feature that allows you to slide and hold the shutter button in order to record video. Unfortunately, I’m not sure what format the resultant pictures take, since there currently appears to be a bug that does not allow these sound photos to be shared. The company says it has almost finished a fix for this, so hopefully you can try it out soon [1].

Coincidentally, yesterday we featured another photo application from Japan for iOS called Voice Pic which performs the same kind of function.

FxCamera’s other functions are similar to those of its Android cousin, with including ‘Toycam,’ ‘Fisheye,’ and ‘Symmetric’ shooting modes.

If you’d like to give it a try for yourself, you can download new FxCamera for iPhone over on the App Store. And if you haven’t yet tried the Android version, it’s still available over on Google Play.

We’ve written about a lot about creative photo applications coming out of Japan. There has been Line Camera, which has some crazy decorative functions, as well as the more recent Manga Camera which lets you turn your photos into a manga-style comic picture. But another photo application got some attention last week at the Techcrunch Tokyo 2012 event, walking away with the ‘Mashup Award.’

UIEvolution’s ‘Voicepic’ app for iPhone brings the element of sound into your photos, letting you add a brief voice comment, or record and attach ambient sound from where the picture was taken. I’ve been a fan of services like Soundslides for a while, so I was excited to learn more about Voicepic’s recent developments, even though it has been around for a while now. Even though you’re just adding audio to one image, this is a pretty great solution for when you find a scene that sounds just as good as it looks. An idling motorcycle, a barking dog — there are lots of fun possibilities here. Here’s one below of a baby laughing. Just press the play button to hear the voice element.

The service could be potentially popular in emerging markets where data speeds aren’t up to par, making video transfers difficult. We recently wrote about California-based Vuclip, and how it are focusing on emerging markets as a target audience for its compressed video product. Voicepic’s director, Manabu Shimobe, tells me that his company is also planning to push Voicepic in similar markets, and I think this is a wise move. I’m told that an Android version is in the works, and that will certainly help make Voicepic more accessible for those with budget handsets. But so far there’s no word on when this version might be released.

But how can a service like this make any money? Manabu explains that there are a number of ways that they could do this. One is by holding sponsored events in the application, asking users to create Voice pics around certain themes. So for example, a noodle company could sponsor the theme of people eating/slurping noodles, and the resulting media could then be shared on social networks.

Other potential monetization strategies include in-app purchases like image and voice filters, or the possibility of selling their solution to with a customized user interface to entertainment companies looking for a creative way to present their content.

So what’s in store for Voicepic in the near future? Manabu adds that they are planning to add login support for Sina Weibo, which will make access to the China market a lot easier for them. The company also plans to continue work on its picture format, as Manabu explains:

We’re planning to embed audio data within jpeg’s application data segment and make the specification publicly available to spread the jpeg+audio format (aka Voicepic format).

I was impressed to see that Voicepics can be embedded and shared on the web, and they can even be played on Facebook after they are shared. But because they depend on Flash right now, that creates some problems for mobile — although they are hoping to rectify this in the coming weeks so that Voicepics can be played on both desktop and mobile. So stay tuned for that.

To learn more about Voicepic, check out the demo video below. Or if you’d like to take it for a test run, go get it in the app store.

The iPhone 5 may be old news to the rest of the world, but Apple still hasn’t officially launched the device in China. And while there’s still no official release date for the device, some China retailers including Beijing Telecom have already started taking preorders, suggesting that the official launch may be imminent.

In the run-up to the launch, China Telecom and China Unicom are preparing to rake in buckets of cash, but gray-market vendors are having to adjust their sky-high prices to prepare for the impending launch. Gray-market imported iPhone 5s from Hong Kong, for example, have dropped by around 1,000 RMB ($160) in the last week as the news pointing to an impending official launch piles up. At the moment, many gray-market phones on Taobao are selling for less than 5,000 RMB ($793), which puts them within just a few hundred RMB of the what the iPhone 5s official price is likely to be when it is released.

This is the circle of gray-market life in China, though, and it’s something that phone scalpers deal with each year, as the demand for imports drops substantially once it becomes clear that the official versions of the phone will be released soon in China. That said, with no official release date announced yet, scalpers can likely squeak out a few more weeks of meager profits before the actual release of the phone requires them to reduce their prices even further.

Either that, or switch to selling gray-market iPad Minis instead.

Here’s a fun iPhone game from the folks over at Japan-based Ponos Games which is today discounted from it’s regular price $0.99, available for free on the iOS app store. Mr. Ninja is a simple game where you slash up invading aliens in an effort to keep your castle safe.

This game has been around since last year, but if you haven’t checked it out yet, I think it’s worth a look. There are three game modes, but only normal mode is available to start. As you play and improve your ninja skills, you’ll unlock new game modes.

The second is ‘Super Chain’ mode, where a timer comes into play, requiring you to slash with a little more urgency. After that, there’s ‘Impossible Mode,’ to which I haven’t yet graduated but I expect to see quite soon!

To get a better idea of how the gameplay works, you can check out the trailer below. And if you like this one, you can check out Ponos’s other ‘Mr’ titles, including Mr. AahH, Mr. Space, and Mr. Oops. The latter two are also available for Android. [h/t AppBank]

None of China’s three mobile telcos have yet set a date for the arrival of the iPhone 5 – though only two of them (China Telecom and China Unicom) are in contention.

China Telecom said last week that it hoped to roll out the phone late November or early December. iPhones and iPads generally hit China long after most other major markets, with a typical delay of three to four months – which is a quarter to a third of the entire product’s life-cycle. Little wonder that so many eager early-adopters are willing to pay premiums from grey-importers who ship in devices (without paying sales tax) from Hong Kong or other countries.

Chinese tech blogs such as Techweb report that China Telecom is preparing one million nano-SIM cards for its own iPhone 5 official launch. The smallest of the three carriers in terms of 3G users, China Telecom has already been handing out free nano-SIM cards to customers who bought grey-import iPhone 5 models from other countries – as have its two other rivals. Clearly the company feels it needs a lot more of those things for its official offerings.

Nano-SIMs are thinner than the micro-SIM cards in earlier iPhone models, so a new card is called for.

Just yesterday we looked at some app analytics that suggested the iPhone 5 already represented 0.1 percent of the smartphones spotted online in China.

A company in Japan is offering a clever mobile map alternative that combines a conventional map display with an augmented reality view in a split-screen presentation. It’s called AR-Maps, and is now available in English thanks to a recent upgrade.

The folks over at Diginfo news have a good video demonstration of the application (see below), showing the various modes available. If you input your destination, you can use the AR view to see your destination overlaid on a live camera view. If you happen to be lost, you can also send your current location to your friends, as a sort of mobile SOS for them to help you out. The app also lets you search for nearby points of interests, like cafes or restaurants.

The company behind the app, Crossfader, has very diplomatically allowed users to switch between Apple’s own maps solution and Google Maps for the map display.

The app has been doing respectably well in Apple’s Japanese app store since its initial launch this summer and briefly held the tap spot in the navigation category in August. A mid-October upgrade to version 1.3 has given it a resurgence that saw it return to number one for a day last month.

The latest version improves battery consumption, added English support, and also has a mode for when your iPhone is sitting in a fixed position, like if it’s mounted on a car dashboard.

Check out the video demo below, for visual explanation of exactly how it works. If you’d like to try it out, you can download it here.

Dragon Collection, Tokyo Game Show 2012

Konami (NYSE:KNM) is announcing today that its popular Dragon Collection game is now available in North America for iOS on the GREE (TYO:3632) platform.

Technically speaking, the game has been available in Canada since August as our friend Serkan Toto pointed out when it launched on the Canadian app store. In Canada, the game’s performance has been modest to date, briefly breaching the top ten rankings in the ‘card’ and ‘strategy’ categories. But Konami and GREE have now launched it for the US market as well, and it remains to be seen how it will fare there.

Dragon Collection is one of the biggest and most successful card battle games in Japan, with more than 7 million users in that country alone.

The announcement says that there will be new monsters designed for this English version of the game, but the core gameplay will be the same as the original.

If you’d like to give it a try, you can get it now in the App Store. An Android version is said to be coming later this year.

Here’s an app from Japan that is totally ridiculous, and probably not worth paying for — but I can’t help but share it anyway.

Ningen Inc’s ‘Watching Cute Girl’ iOS app has a number of different and equally bizarre features. Essentially, it’s just an on-screen girl who watches over you, occasionally reacting to various inputs like sound or movement. There are 180 pre-recorded video patterns that can be played back, depending on the situation or settings. All those behaviors have resulted in a pretty bloated app though, as it’s a 314 MB download.

Actor Kendo Kobayashi supposedly has some input in how this app was developed, and there’s actually a mode that when switched on will address you as Mr. Kobayashi. So if your surname actually is Kobayashi, perhaps you might want to buy this app.

It’s currently on sale for the promotional price of 85 yen (or $0.99), and I’m not even sure it would be worth it at that price. I’m half-tempted though, just to make the home office a little more interesting.

Check it out over at watching.jp, where you can preview many of the different ‘watching girl’ behaviors.

Cook noted that sales of the iPad were up 45 percent for Greater China, while iPhone sales were up 38 percent. He adds:

[A fantastic Q4] brings us to a full year fiscal year revenue number of 23.8 billion for China which is really phenomenal when you think about it, that’s up over 10 billion year-on-year up 78 percent. […] We are continuing to invest in our own retail stores there, we continue to expand distribution in with channel partners as well.

Apple just opened its third retail store in Beijing and there is reportedly one on the way for Shenzhen.

Looking at the global distribution of Apple’s revenue, we can see that the Asia Pacific region, which includes China, remains just behind Europe ($7.5 billion and $8.0 billion respectively).

[Download image version of chart]

Our readers may remember that we featured Manga Camera a few weeks back, a photo application from Japan which had started very hot in the Japanese app store after its release in early September. The application lets you apply manga-style frames and filters to your photos, making them look like scenes from a Japanese manga.

VS Media is pointing out today that Manga Camera topped the 3 million download mark just a few days ago, thanks to rising popularity in the US, the UK, and even in Greater China. Here’s a quick overview of the top ten countries by downloads as of October 19. As you can see, Japan is still by far its most popular market, but there’s certainly lots of love developing in other countries, especially around Asia.

While the app’s momentum appears to be leveling off, VS Media notes that a major upgrade is coming in November, and that could bring a resurgence in popularity if all goes well for the folks at Super Software, the app’s developer.

For those of you who have experimented with Manga Camera already, let us know your thoughts in the comments. For those of you who haven’t, you can check it out in the App Store.

It’s no secret that the English-language version of Apple’s Siri iPhone app can recognize and answer queries about where to find prostitutes. But apparently Apple is an equal-opportunity pimp, because Chinese users have recently discovered that the Chinese version of Siri contains the same functionality. When given input like “I want to visit prostitutes,” it searches for local escort and “entertainment” listings. How helpful! In the video below, you can also see Siri helping a Chinese user search for pornographic images of Sola Aoi. (Note: the video doesn’t contain any pornographic images, but it may be NSFW if your bosses can speak Chinese).

Given that Apple strictly forbids pornographic and sexually explicit apps, it’s very odd that Siri includes this functionality at all, and I wonder whether Chinese Siri’s willingness to search for pornographic terminology over Chinese telecommunications networks is a violation of Chinese law. Prostitution, of course, is also illegal in China, but it is widespread enough that I expect plenty of iPhone users will consider this to be one of Siri’s most useful features. But as many Chinese commenters have pointed out, it is also probably a pretty useful service for police looking to crack down on prostitution.

[China News Service via Sina Tech]

Today the company is announcing that it has surpassed the 20 million downloads mark. Of course, this goes all the way back to when the Android app first started out in 2009. But its growth is nonetheless impressive, as you can see in the chart below. The app was refreshed back in June of this year, leading to bit of a resurgence in popularity. And while it’s not the kind of off-the-charts growth we saw with domestic rival Line Camera, it still looks pretty good.

FxCamera for Android, downloads over time

If you haven’t yet tried FxCamera, the application lets you add a number of effects to your smartphone photographs, including toy camera effects, fisheye and symmetrical effects, and more.

The Japan-based app is actually more popular in the US than it is at home, with its top five countries being the US, Japan, Korea, India, and Thailand, in that order. The US is also its fastest growing country as well.

Bit Cellar also notes that an iPhone app is soon on the way, so stay tuned for that as well.

Photo: iTunes.Apple.com

Electronic Gamelan, or e-gamelan, is the name of an iOS app that has been created by students and lecturers of the University of Dian Nuswantoro (Udinus) Semarang, Central Java, Indonesia. The app brings the complete sound of Indonesia’s traditional instrument, the Javanese gamelan, which is a large set of xylophones, drums, and gongs. The precision of percussive tones is similar to the original gamelan.

Udinus is an IT-oriented university in Semarang. The e-Gamelan team has performed in many countries like Singapore, Malaysia, and Taiwan. In the country, they have performed for the Governor of Central Java. Later in October, the team will perform at the State Palace.

Team member Ikhsanuddin Mohammed Rahmatullah said that the e-Gamelan community formed about two years ago. All the gamelan objects and sound recordings are taken from the Sri Kuncoro Mulyo Gamelan in Indonesia’s historical music studio, Lokananta in Surakarta. Starting with the inception of the e-Gamelan project by one of the lecturers, they began thinking how to create the modern gamelan. Rahmat said:

This is faculty research. We are under a research body and community service. It started when we won a competition set by the minister of Education and Cultural Affairs.

The purpose of the e-Gamelan app is to attract youth towards traditional music at a time when kids are gravitating towards western pop music – or popular music in general. E-Gamelan rises to the challenge via the iPad app. To achieve these goals, the community works with kids on the e-Gamelan app/program as an extracurricular activity at several high schools in Semarang. As a result, the students are said to have become more interested in the gamelan.

(See also: Bring Out Your Inner Beastie Boy with the Gamelan DJ App)

According to Rahmat, after using e-Gamelan, players can sort of play the original traditional instrument. However, to use the app, you don’t need to know the Javanese instrument. Approximately, it takes two days to be able to smoothly play e-Gamelan.

Several types of gamelan can not be played in the app – or maybe in any app – because of inevitable difficulties with complex actions on a touchscreen. So you won’t find the gender gamelan, the two-headed drum called the kendang, and the two-stringed fiddle called rebab.

e-Gamelan can be downloaded from the Apple App Store for US$5.99. The purchase price of the app will be used by the team partly to preserve the original gamelan – the other half of the income of course goes towards app production and recording costs. Before you buy, check out a demo video here:

[Source: Republika.co.id, Egamelanku]

As we saw in last year’s tragic earthquake in Japan, communication in the wake of a disaster can be a huge problem. Last year network disruptions left many people unable to get in touch with loved ones to find out their whereabouts.

Earthquake Buddy is a new mobile application which aims to resolve the problem of locating people in the event of an earthquake. Once you buy the app (for $4.99), you enter the contact information of four friends or family members. And in the event of an earthquake that registers higher than magnitude 5.5, your buddies will be alerted with your location (see more in demo video below). In addition to the English version, there are Japanese and Spanish versions as well.

Earthquake Buddy was developed by a company called The App Collective, based out of Australia. It was funded by angel investors with contributions from Screen NSW as well. I spoke with CEO Adam Wells to find out more about the app, and the company’s future plans.

Could you tell me a little about your company and this project?

The App Collective was formed to save lives through the use of mobile technology and community engagement. It is currently designing a range of rescue apps including tornado Buddy, Hurricane Buddy, Hiking Buddy. Earthquake Buddy is also being presently developed in the Android platform as well.

As the name implies, The App Collective is a disparate group of app designers, developers and marketeers brought together to make a real difference in saving lives. In all there are two founding ‘employees’ with external experts in the above-mentioned disciplines. Our collective aim is to save lives using both high technology with community engagement.

Importantly, the app has been independently endorsed by Global ‘Recovery Tsar,’ professor Ed Blakely, who headed up the Hurricane Katrina recovery among others. His endorsement allows us to take the app to The United Nations and possibly The World Bank.

How did the project start?

We were astonished to learn that most rescue services often don’t know where to begin their search when trying to find missing victims of large earthquakes. Earthquake Buddy is designed to solve this fundamental problem by ensuring community engagement can act swiftly to find them.

Once Earthquake Buddy is downloaded, users are prompted to enter their details and details of four friends or family members to become their ‘buddies.’ In the event of an earthquake above 5.5 on the Richter scale [1], the user’s buddies are instantaneously and automatically sent an email, from the cloud, showing a Google map of their location. After 30 minutes, if the user has not heard from his buddies, they can go straight to the Google map location (if safe to do so); or contact emergency services to alert them of their buddies’ location.

Most importantly, the message is designed so it will be received prior to any telecommunications outage and thus does not rely on the iPhone itself to be sent. Buddies can also receive an SMS, a Facebook post and tweet with the same details.

The new app is designed not only for people living in earthquake zones, but also for tourists and business travelers nervous about traveling to quake prone destinations like New Zealand, Japan, the west coast of the USA, and Asia.

What are your plans to promote the Japanese version?

Japan is a primary country for the app. I used to live there, and remember the lengths government and community used to go to prepare for the next big one. Well, the next big one hit last year, and we are determined that through this app we can make a difference to the people of Japan.

There is no other app that automatically and in real-time, finds lived ones after an earthquake. This is why we developed the Japanese language version of the app.

As mentioned above there will be an Android version for Japan in the next couple of months. We plan to engage with government departments, natural disaster management associations and NGOs to spread the word about an app that does so much.

Was there ever any thought to make it a free app somehow, in order to make it available to more people?

We are talking to Apple about changing the remuneration model to a subscription whereby people can buy it for less, then update their subscription in say, 1 year, 3 years etc. We are also deciding on NGOs about sponsorship/s which would allow us to offer it at a lower price. A freemium model is not workable as the app is not an app with value-adds, nor would advertising work as it’s not an app that you would interface with everyday.

That leaves the up-front fee, which we have priced to enable us to continue our development of other rescue apps and platforms. The alternative is per above. When we launch in India and China, our price will definitely be lower.

Is there any plan to speak with local carriers (Docomo, KDDI, Softbank in particular) about licensing the app and pre-loading it on as many smartphones as possible?

We are open to speaking to telcos although our initial launch is direct. We would welcome a dialogue with these telcos though.

Besides India and China, are there plans to expand to other Asian countries? Indonesia perhaps?

China will be our next language, with a possible version for India in Hindi. However we are pragmatic, and know that most of India is not as earthquake prone as Nepal, Pakistan and Bangladesh. An indonesian version is definitely planned. Our decision not to initially develop in Indonesia was because of Indonesia’s high concentration of Symbian phones. We watch market penetration keenly, and as soon as we can see that Android and iOS has a critical mass in Indonesia, we will launch there too.

The iPhone 4S’s first birthday is coming right up, a China Radio report points out, but many of China’s iPhone 4S handsets may spend their birthdays back on the shelf in secondhand markets. Although the phones are far from outdated, the announcement of the iPhone 5 (and the subsequent arrival of gray-market iPhone 5s) has led to a flood of users trading in their iPhone 4Ses. The price for a new 4S has gone down, of course, but the secondhand market is apparently flooded and less-than-mint condition iPhone 4Ses are selling for as litte as a few hundred RMB (around $100).

One Taobao seller who spoke with China Radio told a reporter that he was taking in lots of used iPhone 4S handsets. 4S owners in Beijing could even choose to have someone come to their home or place of work to pick up the phone, the vendor said. And, of course, since anything Apple is popular, it seems that vendors aren’t having much trouble finding new homes for these pawned 4S handsets. I guess everyone wins, at least until you look at how much it costs to buy an iPhone in China, then sell it at a much lower price than you paid so you can buy another expensive iPhone less than a year later.

If you’re in the market for a 4S, used ones are now going for about 2600 RMB ($412). That might sound like a lot but considering that buying a new iPhone 4S in China from Apple right now will run you at least 4488 RMB ($712), it’s not a bad deal at all. Especially since an iPhone 4S can’t possibly be over a year old. Most of the available 4Ses are Hong Kong phones, gray market imports that eager Apple fans bought before the phone’s eventual release in mainland China and are now selling to pay for the new iPhone 5. Some of them even come with a half-year warranties.

Buyer beware, though: some sellers are also spending a few hundred dollars to put some polish into their used stock and then selling the phones as officially refurbished units, which can go for higher prices.

[China Radio via Sina Tech, image source]

Here’s a fun Friday app recommendation, as Hakuhodo DY Media Partners has released ‘Daiby’ for iPhone, an app that lets you record your baby’s first few years.

There are a number of features included in this application. The most notable is the the photo-by-date function, which can be used like the many photo-a-day apps already on the market. But you can also add comments, and the app will note how many days old your baby is (i.e. this is the first day, tenth day, or 1,000th day).

Photos are stored locally on your iPhone which is a bit of bummer. Some kind of iCloud or Dropbox integration would have been nice.

The app can also transform your photos into a movie, with a soundtrack added. There’s a sample video showing the end results below. While the app is free, one of ways it plans to make money is by charging for multiple slideshows, as well as certain advanced settings (see below.)

The feature which is most interesting however, it the information delivery system, which sends the parents useful information based on the babies age. This could be things like vaccination information, special offers, or other parenting information.

So far the Daiby application is in Japanese and English only, although apparently more languages are in the works, including Chinese.

Photo: 7langit.com

Starting today, Java Festival Production held the biggest soul music event in Indonesia, Java Soulnation 2012. This festival will last for three days, from September 28th to 30th. Soulnation 2012 will bring soul, hip hop, R&B, and rap beats from worldwide caliber musicians like James Morrison, Robin Thicke, Color Me Badd, and US’s electric disco band Scissor Sisters. There are also local performers too. To accompany you on your night out, application developer 7Langit is back with the Java Soulnation app, 2012 edition (Yes, they were the folks behind the 2011 edition).

This paperless concert guide keep you from getting lost in this big concert venue by providing a map and directions. Just like a typical concert guide app, you can find general information about Soulnation 2012. You can learn more about the performers by reading their bio in the artist menu, and see the schedule for the event.

Sometimes when you’re in a festival, you can lose track of time. But with this app you won’t miss your favorite musician thanks to its reminders feature. You can save the schedule of your favorite artist to your mobile’s calendar and get alerted when the time comes. There are also prizes from the event’s main sponsor. All you have to do is check out the Special Quiz menu. You can also join the Twitter quiz by directly replying or retweeting @Javasoulnation from within the app.

You can even sing and record songs through this app. There are Pledge and Record features from “Soul of the Nation” section. This feature asks users to join a patriotic movement to pledge their love for Indonesia. All you have to do is sing along to Indonesia’s national anthem with young Indonesian singer, Raisa Andriana. By doing this, it is expected that the initiative could be the biggest sing along in the world. This campaign has been ongoing this month, and participants have recorded their videos and uploaded them to YouTube. The uploaded videos will be aired on September 30th, 2012 at the Indosat stage at the Java Soulnation Festival 2012.

So far the app supports BlackBerry and Android. As for iPhone users, the link will be updated soon. Meanwhile, practice your singing skill with Raisa here:

Today, Sina Tech discovered that Apple’s new iPhone 5 has passed China’s 3C authentication process. Both the China Unicom (WCDMA) and China Telecom (CDMA) versions have been approved. 3C is the nickname for a government-mandated certification system, and getting verified is one of the hurdles the iPhone 5 will have to jump over before its release in China.

However, Chinese Apple fans should not start partying just yet. The iPhone 5 still hasn’t passed MIIT’s network permit process. A network permit is required for all telecommunications devices; therefore, the iPhone 5 isn’t going to be seeing any store shelves (legally) until MIIT gives it the OK. That’s generally a fairly lengthy process, so don’t expect an iPhone 5 release just yet.

Of course, gray-market phones are available in China, but thanks to Apple’s worldwide shortage following the phone’s sales records on day one of its release, they aren’t cheap. In fact, most of them will cost eager Apple fans more than $1,000. But if you’ve got to have an iPhone 5 in the next few months, that is probably the only way you’re getting one.

[via Sina Tech]

Photo: Apple App Store

After a rapid jounrney from being a Flash game to PCs to mobile gaming, Infectonator is now out on Android and iOS. Indonesian startup developer Toge Production launched the smartphone versions on September 24th, 2012 with a price tag of $0.99 on both Google Play and the iTunes App Store. Infectonator still brings the same recipe to the mobile game: infecting people, turning them into zombies, and dominating the world.

Before its official release, a fake version dubbed “Infectonator 2” was released on Google Play. But that was illegally ported as an Android app from Toge’s Flash-based game by an account under the name Hasan Akyurek. This award-winning game developer based in Indonesia was furious about this hijacking of its popular game. But now the rogue title has been taken down.

The new Infectonator game has language support for English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and lots of world languages – and of course Indonesian too. There are also more than 10 unique zombies to play with.

The Infectonator storyline places the player as the person who spreads the virus which turns humans into zombies. You need to decide which city is the target to launch the virus. This will affect the rest of the game. The challenge is to keep the endurance of your brain-dead workforce. In a limited time before the zombies run out of energy, you will have to kill all of the population. And yes, there will be blood. Also there will be coins falling from the pockets of citizens, which you’ll need to collect. Your objective is to destroy all humanity and dominate the world.

The pleasure of playing with a touchscreen phone replaces the way you control the game when it was a Flash game. No longer is there a need to fiddle with the mouse, and now you can just swipe to collect the coins from the victims.

As for monetization in the mobile version, it has in-app purchases for coins to increase the ability of your zombie troops. There is even a package deal to open a whole zombie army. If you don’t want to spend more, you have to be more patient to collect all the coins in the game for getting upgrades.

Are you ready to rule the world with zombies? Get Infectonator in Android’s Google Play or Apple App Store. See the video demo here:

[Source: Kompas.com - article in Indonesian]

An AutoNavi/Apple Maps map of Taipei, Taiwan. Apparently the city is just a collection of parks and gardens now.

Since the upgrade to iOS 6 there have been, well, some complaints about Apple’s new Maps app. In fact, the thing has been kind of a disaster. This is as true in China as it has been anywhere else, and while the iPhone 5 isn’t out in China yet, iPhone 4 and 4S users who have upgraded to iOS 6 are looking for answers, and Apple has thusfar only provided some PR bullshit.

AutoNavi (NASDAQ:AMAP) — the Chinese company that’s providing Apple’s maps for China and some other parts of Asia — has been less quiet, though. It has responded to Chinese user complaints by saying that there is nothing wrong with the AutoNavi Maps product, and the reason for the issues people have experienced is that apparently, the upgrade to iOS 6 has caused some users to be unable to connect to the AutoNavi service. Their maps of China, then, are being served by TomTom (another Apple Maps partner), and that’s where the mistakes are coming from.

AutoNavi has even offered a workaround fix for Chinese users who want the AutoNavi maps back:

1. Close the Maps app
2. Set your system time to seven days in the future. (So if today is Sept. 25, set it for Oct. 2)
3. Reset the phone
4. Open Maps, if the Autonavi logo appears in the bottom right, you’re all set.

Of course, this fix does nothing to rectify many of the complains about Maps, some of which seem to be issues with AutoNavi’s maps themselves. (For example, the terrible map of Taiwan is an AutoNavi map issue and won’t be fixed by getting rid of the TomTom maps in China). It also isn’t clear whether you have to keep your system set seven days into the future for this “fix” to keep working; if so, that would be horribly inconvenient.

In the end, I guess it’s your choice: do you want a phone that can no longer tell you the correct date or a phone that can no longer provide you with accurate maps? Personally, the more I see of AutoNavi’s Maps and the more silence I hear coming from Apple, the more I think about making my next phone an Android…

(And of course, for Chinese users, another option would just be to switch to Baidu Maps, which just got a sweet update).

[Beijing News via Sina Tech]

If you ever wondered just how fast China’s iPhone scalpers are, consider this: the iPhone 5 was released on Friday morning in Hong Kong. By Friday evening, the device was on sale in shops in Zhongguancun, Beijing’s tech district.

Of course, that shouldn’t be much surprise to anyone; a mad dash to the airport, a quick plane flight, and a hurried cab ride to the far side of Beijing is a small effort to put in for the kind of profits gray market phone scalpers are posting right now. The device, which costs about $720 in Hong Kong, is being sold for between $1050 and $1333 on the mainland. We know Hong Kong residents aren’t happy seeing their public transit clogged with scalpers, but at more than $600 of profit per device, who can blame them? That’s more pure profit than Apple itself makes!

If you’re wondering whether there are any iPhones left for actual Hong Kongers, the answer might be no. According to a research report by Forrester, around 70 percent of Apple products sold in Hong Kong end up for sale again in mainland China. But MIC Gadget reports that Hong Kongers are making solid profits off the devices as well, even reselling them to scalpers who then smuggle them into China for another resale.

Of course the reason for the madness is that iPhones won’t be officially available in China for at least a few months. As per China’s laws, the phone will need to be cleared for access to China’s wireless networks by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) before it can be sold in the country. This year though, Apple’s new Maps app — already the subject of much derision — will also need inspection. Because its map data is provided by AutoNavi, a Chinese company, we don’t expect it will face any serious delays as a result, but the process takes at least a couple months. Those who want a shiny new iPhone 5 before everyone else are going to have to pay dearly for the privilege.

[Image via Sina Tech]

Our friends over at Coconuts Bangkok recently pointed to new iOS application which provides information from Thailand’s Office of National Water and Flood Management Policy. Last year’s floods affected more than 3 million people in the country, so certainly any effort to keep people better informed is worthwhile.

The app is called Water4Thai, and it’s available for free on the iPhone in both English and Thai. It includes rainfall reports, daily tide information, weather charts, and more [1].

I like apps like these a lot, especially ones which are based here in Asia, a region more prone to natural disasters than anywhere else in the world. We need better ways of getting information quick, and there is much that can be done in the digital/mobile space to help. Last year we did see a lot of social media innovation spring up in the wake of the Thailand floods, on Twitter, Facebook, and even on Google Docs. We saw similar online activity during this year’s floods in the Philippines.

Water4Thai held the number one app spot for a few days in the past week in the Thailand app store. It is still the top app in the weather category (see below).

Hopefully we can see more organizations and individuals working on such information services well in advance of any disasters that may occur.

Water4Thai on Thai app store, AppAnnie.com

Photo: japanmobiletech.com

Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) has abandoned Google Maps in favor of its own solution in the newly released iOS. But it seems that from a consumer point of view, that this move has some undesirable consequences – at least in Asia.

Japan Mobile Tech blog contrasts the very low detail for some areas in Japan, notably some train stations which show up as little more than a point on a map. Of course Google has a pretty big head start in developing its maps, and Apple will improve over time – but in terms of delivering the best possible experience to your users, there is little doubt that this isn’t it. JMT also says that even Narita airport is apparently not in Apple’s database [1].

Meanwhile, across the water in China it appears that Apple has an entirely different set of problems. Tony Zhu over on Morning Whistle claims that some users are finding their maps app being directed to maps from TomTom (AMS:TOM2), Apple’s partner outside of China, rather than maps from Apple’s China partner, AutoNavi (NASDAQ:AMAP).

Islands for everyone!

And if that wasn’t enough of a clustermuck, Samuel Wade points out on Twitter that Apple’s map has duplicated the disputed Senkaku islands, showing two sets where there should be just one (pictured right) [2]. Is this Apple’s effort at a diplomatic solution, providing a set of islands for each country?

It might be a screw up, but it’s certainly better than Baidu’s stance.

It is hard to believe that Apple would be stupid enough to label the islands as part of Japan on the mainland Chinese version of the device, especially since selling such a map domestically would be illegal. But picking sides in any of the localized versions of Maps is likely to cause controversy. Chinese users will be angry if anyone’s version of Maps lists the islands as part of Japan, and Japanese users may be annoyed that at least the mainland Chinese version lists the islands as Chinese. If the phone that comes out on Friday in many countries lists the islands as Japanese, it is also quite possible that the Chinese government will delay approval of the iPhone 5′s China release as retribution.

It will be especially interesting to see where Maps lists the islands on Hong Kong phones. Hong Kong is technically a part of China but is administered separately; the iPhone 5 releases there this Friday. Honestly, Apple would probably be wisest not to label the islands at all, and that’s a strategy that wouldn’t be totally unwarranted — they are, after all, basically tiny uninhabited rocks.

But the mere suggestion that Apple might consider the islands part of Japan has been enough to arouse anger on Chinese social media. One weibo user called for others to “resist this product, and despise those who use it!” The calls for an Apple boycott seem to be widespread, although as the reports that Apple has “given” the islands to Japan are as yet unconfirmed, they are also clearly a bit premature.

Allow me to go out on a limb here, though, and suggest that regardless of what iOS 6 does with the islands in China and abroad, Chinese people will buy the iPhone 5 in droves. As I wrote last week, I am convinced at this point that virtually nothing will get between China (or many other countries, for that matter) and its iDevices. If Foxconn employing forced student labor isn’t enough to turn Chinese off buying iPhones, I can’t imagine a few dots on a map are going to tip the scales, no matter how much bluster there may be online.

[People's Daily Online via Sina Tech]

Photo: itunes.apple.com

This is not an ordinary ranch. Faunia Rancher is a game that’ll take you on a journey full of fairies and monsters. But the gremlins are actually cute. You can even meet an Indonesian monster called Barong in its traditional Balinese house. For this mythological journey, Chowdown Games and Joyverter Entertainment worked together as ‘Art on Code’ and this weekend won the INAICTA 2012 awards in the games category.

The idea is simple: raise these adorable little monsters and take them on a journey to win crystals so that you can create more virtual gnarly creatures. But its story is what makes it interesting. As a rancher, you will have to raise a unique fantasy creature called “Faunia”.

The way you raise the Faunia makes it like a Tamagochi-style game. You will have to feed them, clean their habitat, participate in regular activities, and treat them when they’re sick. As the Faunia grows, it will give you eggs that can be sold. There are some fun “mini games” bundled in too.

Faunia Rancher was developed by Ronald Widjaja, Erick Theodorus, Burhan Dewantara, Robert Tan, Robin Tjungestu, and Felix Jingga. Even though it has Barong as its Indonesian mascot, this game was intended for the international market. Ronald explains:

We’re open to all kinds of monsters, from Barong to Frankenstein. We also have a collaborations for other characters, such as with Animonster [Indonesia’s anime and lifestyle magazine] and Vandaria [a card game from ZIGMA magazine]. In the future, maybe we can approach a local franchise like Garudayana to put their “Garu” monster in our game.

To keep the developers’ kitchen steaming, this iOS game has in-app purchases for every gimmick in the game. You can buy food, medicine, and even crystal shards to speed up the growth of new Faunias for around $1 to $5 each. Without major promotion, Faunia Rancher have 10,000 players in its first 3,5 months, and sells 5 different kinds of virtual coins every day.

To build the community, Faunia Rancher has its own actual merchandise. More than 2,000 gamers on the Faunia Rancher Facebook page have participated in a design competition for new characters and various kinds of fan art.

Grab the free Faunia Rancher game in the iTunes App Store.

Here’s a fun application from Japan which has been the country’s top free iOS app for the past five days, after its September 11th release. Manga Camera is one of the more unique photo applications out there, allowing you to create your own manga-like pictures.

You’ll need an iPhone (on iOS 5+) to use it though, and if you try installing it on an iPad, as I did, it won’t work. Essentially, it lets you take photos and apply an assortment of manga-style frames (32 in total, see below) to your shot. It also applies a sort of monochrome filter, noting that it works best when you stand in front of a white background.

After finalizing your picture, you can then share to social networks like Facebook or Twitter, or save it to your photo library.

While the app is sitting pretty at number one in Japan, it might do even better if it allowed users to caption their own photos, or even create and share their own online books. Another Japan-based app, Mooklet, does this quite well (see our review from June), and I can’t help but think that Manga Camera might be a killer photo app if it had this function.

Photo: Muslim Pro Google +

The Muslim demographic can be a big target market for business. Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life predicts that the Muslim population will grow to 35 percent of the world’s total population by 2030, when there will be 2.2 billion muslims around the world. It’s a promising market.

Islamic mobile application, Muslim Pro just announced a new update, and it has been downloaded over 1 million times on Google Play.

Muslim Pro 2.0 is a complete visual and functional revamp for its Android application. The update is also available on Apple’s App Store for iPhone and iPod users with Muslim Pro 5.x. The latest version also provides Android ecosystem support with a brand new Google+ page.

The 2.0 version presents the new looks with sleek design to support Android’s latest Ice Cream Sandwich and Jellybean iterations. For Muslim travellers, you can locate halal restaurants and mosques nearby. It’s also easier to continuously worship Allah with the 99 beautiful names of Allah in Hasma Ul-Usma feature. The existing features also received improvements, like prayer time, adhan, qibla locator, and audio Qur’an [1].

Unfortunately, the 2.0 version is still crashing on Android. But I understand the developer will be fixing the bugs right away with the 2.0.1 version.

You can upgrade to the premium version for $4.99 to read the full Quran, remove banner ads, and use the widget, select different adhan, and access email support. Note that 20 percent of its proceeds are given to an Islamic charity organization. If you’re not happy with paying the app, just enjoy the free version.

This app gives easy to use complete pocket guide, especially for frequent Muslim travellers. Muslim Pro features might help a lot by simply find local halal delicacies or helping your locate Qibla in your hotel room.

That’s the front page of Sina Tech’s Telecom section right now. The word iPhone appears 52 separate times on that page. It’s the sort of thing I would normally associate with paid “advertorials”, but that’s not what’s going on here, because it’s everywhere. iPhone appears 44 times on Tencent’s QQ News’s Mobile front page. Even the typically-restrained TechWeb has iPhone 23 times on its mobile front page. We here at Tech in Asia have run four stories about the iPhone 5, a phone that was released yesterday. Three of those four stories are by me.

So let me just say out loud what I’ve been thinking at myself for a little while now: WTF.

On the one hand, this is totally legit. From a reporter’s perspective, it’s the biggest story happening right now, and it’s what readers want to read anyway. There’s no denying that putting “Apple” or “iPhone” in your headline is a good way to bump pageviews (as opposed to the regulatory stuff I like to write about from time to time, which appears to be anathema to most of our readers). And there’s no denying that nobody puts on a show like Apple. Their presentations are exquisitely engineered to entertain, and you may consider them misleading or just PR nonsense, but they’re never boring. That’s something other tech companies can and have learned from; Xiaomi product announcements for example have a bit of an Apple flair to them.

On the other hand, this is ridiculous. It is a phone. Running twenty different stories about a single phone release is insane, isn’t it? At what point does it stop being news coverage and start being hysteria or, perhaps worse, free advertising? It can’t be all our fault — after all, people are crazy about these phones — but how much of this is the absurd demand for Apple news and how much is tech media milking the story for everything we can get out of it?

These aren’t questions I have an answer to, and I must admit we’re probably not done writing about the iPhone 5. But I’d be interested to hear what readers think about all this — that is, if you’re not too busy poring over all the latest iPhone reports.

(Of course, this isn’t just a China problem. Gizmodo has ten front page stories about the new iPhone right now, and they run a lot fewer stories on their front page than any Chinese portal does.)

As now seems par for the course with Apple announcements, the wake of the iPhone 5 announcement has brought a lot of disappointment. In China, users have taken to social media like Sina Weibo to express their disappointment with the less-than-revolutionary new model. For example, a poll Sina was conducting before the launch showed just over 21 percent of users interested in buying an iPhone 5. But now a newer Weibo poll created after the announcement shows that the percentage of users planning to buy the iPhone 5 on Weibo has dropped to 16.

Of course, a Weibo poll is hardly scientific, but there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence as well. Browsing through weibo and other social media in China, it’s easy to find comments like this one:

To be honest, I was a bit excited about the iPhone 5 announcement last night. I was hoping for some kind of innovation to please fans like me. But in the end it was just a meeting to confirm everything the press had already reported. Aside from being thinner, longer, and not being able to use a SIM card, there was nothing there to surprise me.

Does this mean Apple could be facing a harder sell than usual in China? I highly doubt it. The same thing has happened with the last two Apple product announcements, but the post-announcement disappointment didn’t translate into lower sales. According to Apple’s SEC filings, there has been strong demand for the 4S and the new iPad in China and in fact the actual release of both products sparked a growth in sales. Chinese net users, it seems, don’t like to let their disappointment get in the way of actually buying Apple products.

As I have said before, the iPhone 5 does face a potential new challenge in the plethora of cheap smartphones now flooding the Chinese market, but I don’t believe sales will be particularly affected by this. In China, the iPhone is a luxury item, and I know I’m starting to sound like a broken record with this, but I really think the fact that it’s visibly different from previous models is going to help push it to even more impressive sales than the 4S enjoyed, because that makes it much easier to show off.

Only time will tell if China’s really interested in the new iPhone, and the official launch is still a long way off. But judging from the fact that gray market iPhone 5s are already being listed on Taobao in anticipation of the device’s release next week, it seems pretty clear that once again, disappointment and diminished demand are two very different things.

Apple unveiled its next chapter with the iPhone 5 launch very early this morning. The first batch of country releases will be on September 21. Singapore is the closest country to Indonesia to first get the slimmer iPhone 5. The second phase of launches is on September 28, 2012. As usual, Indonesia is not on that list – and so the wait goes on.

If we look back in time, the iPhone 4S came to Indonesia in January 2012. Indonesians had to wait three months from the time of the pre-orders in October 2011. It looks like history will repeat itself, as predicted by an Indonesian Apple products distributor, who reckons that the iPhone 5 might arrive in the nation in January 2013. But perhaps pre-orders will begin in November from the mobile carrier, Telkomsel.

Apple’s iPhone partner in the country always reveals package deals less than a week from the launch. As a benchmark, we can use the iPhone 4S pricing by two operator partners, XL and Telkomsel in January 2012. Telkomsel offered the 16GB version of the iPhone 4S for Rp7,7 million ($803.51) unlocked, while XL was slightly higher at Rp7,99 million ($833.77). For the 32GB one, Telkomsel was cheaper than XL at Rp8,8 million ($918.29), while XL headed up to Rp9,199 million ($959.93). Telkomsel sold the 64GB iPhone 4S for Rp9,9 million ($1,033.08) and XL for Rp10,399 million ($1,085.15).

The operators have no info yet about the iPhone 5. Head of marketing communications at Telkomsel, Irlamsyah Syam, said that there has been no discussion yet regarding the iPhone 5. The public relations manager at XL Axiata, Henry Wijayanto, also said that XL still hasn’t decided yet. For now, Henry said that XL is still in intense communications with Apple’s iPhone representative.

While Apple is moving forwards to LTE with the iPhone 5, Indonesia’s telcos are still struggling to use the last two remaining blocks of the 3G channel. The last chapter of the 3G channel saga in Indonesia was announced yesterday. Henry said that XL is still preparing for 3G’s tender mechanism. LTE networks which are supported by the iPhone 5 are not in the picture in the country at the moment. Henry said:

LTE network is not about technology, but regarding the regulations. We are not ready yet. We have to see the government preparedness to set up the regulations.

Mobile operators have nothing to offer for now, yet online sellers find a way to make their own announcements. Online sellers are taking this launch as an opportunity to sell iPhone 5 replicas from China. If you want the real deal and can’t wait that long, members of the online forum Kaskus who are overseas will get you your gadget via a shady route. Some have already opened pre-order to buy iPhone 5 on September 21, and then the shiny new device will be carried directly into Indonesia. Its a limited offer. Just like asking your friend to bring you something from abroad.

In the wake of the iPhone 5 launch, Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) has published an updated list of international availability for iOS 6 features, including new maps and navigation functions, as well as new Siri capabilities. You can check them all in detail over on Apple’s website, or you can check the table below showing how regions in Asia compare.

Interestingly, China is the only Asian region to get ‘traffic’ maps, which uses real-time traffic conditions to figure out your ETA. Oddly, China does not get turn-by-turn navigation. The new 3D buildings feature is still only in the US.

Greater China regions (excluding Macau), Japan, and South Korea will also get the Siri Sports feature, which will be a big plus for sports fans on the go. Twitter and Facebook integration for Siri is limited to mostly those regions as well, with the exception of China where those networks are blocked.

Siri Local search and restaurant info remains limited to select areas, mostly in North American, Europe, and Australia. [Via The Verge]

Combining Tao Te Ching levels of “WTF” and “Meh, I’m not really surprised,” China’s finest smugglers are preparing to sell the newly-unveiled iPhone 5 for a cool 10,000 RMB – that’s $1,500, a more than 100 percent markup over its Hong Kong price of HK$5,588 (4,560 RMB). The fast-working grey importers say they’ll be ready to start selling the iPhone 5 on September 21st, its initial global launch date, thanks to smuggling in the phone from Hong Kong.

Thereafter, plenty of other nearby Asian launch locations – such as Singapore – will keep the flow of grey imported stock high for hungry mainland Chinese buyers. The iPhone 5 has no set launch date for China via any official channel, and it’s normal for it to take two to three months to pass regulatory approval and hit shelves. By which time, most early adopters will have already gotten theirs from the third-party vendors who get human gadget mules to haul sack-loads of iPhones across the Hong Kong-Shenzhen border, or in luggage from other countries.

A grey importer and seller told Techweb that stores in Shenzhen will get the device the same day as the Hong Kong launch, and some early buyers in Beijing might get it the same day if the express couriers are up to the task. He quoted a price of “not less than 10,000 RMB” ($1,500) for the initial batch. Only after a steady supply for a week or so will the price go down to something a bit more normal.

Scalpers often prove a problem at Chinese launches of major gadgets, and so Apple abolished the first-come, first-serve overnight queues for the new iPad in Hong Kong in March of this year, and will likely do the same this time round for the iPhone 5. It’s not yet clear if that will scupper the gadget mules in their bid to source phones for the China-based sellers. If so, that grey-market price will remain high for quite a few weeks.

[Source: Techweb - article in Chinese]

First off, the phone does sport a brand-new design, with a larger screen. As ridiculous as this sounds, the fact that it’s going to be visibly different from the iPhone 4 and the iPhone 4S should help its sales in China, as iPhones are a kind of status symbol and people like to show off. Other hardware updates like a better camera and support for panoramic pictures should be as popular in Asia as they are everywhere else — after all, who doesn’t like taking panoramic pictures?

In terms of software, the phone will run the new iOS 6, which features a bunch of upgrades, including Apple’s new Maps app. It looks amazing, but I suspect that depending on your location, results may vary in Asia. I’m sure it’s got a fully 3D Tokyo set to go with turn-by-turn driving directions, but if you’re in rural Laos, I’m guessing they don’t have 3D satellite imagery of your area yet. You never know though; Apple didn’t specifically address this in its presentation.

The new iOS 6 also features an updated Siri, although it’s not clear what languages she’s launching with, and more widespread Facebook integration. The latter update obviously doesn’t do much for China, where Facebook is blocked, but it will likely prove popular in other countries like Japan and Korea, where the site has recently been growing in popularity.

The phone is coming to a number of Asian telecoms — no surprise there — including KDDI, KT, SK telecom, SmartTone, SingTel, SoftBank, and more. Since it supports LTE networks, many of these carriers should be offering the phone with 4G. No Chinese carriers were listed, probably because the phone doesn’t have an official China release date yet, but of course when the phone does come to China there is no 4G network to use it on, and there won’t be for at least another year.

So when can you get your hands on it? That depends on where you are. Japan, Hong Kong, and Singapore will get it at the same time as the US and the UK (among other places) on September 21. 20 additional countries will get the phone in October, and Apple says it will be in more than 100 countries by December.

Needless to say, a Chinese release date was not listed. We don’t expect the iPhone 5 anytime soon in China — there’s generally a delay of at least a month or two while it goes through China’s painfully slow permit processes — but at least one person appears to be already lining up for it outside the Shanghai Apple store. Good luck, dude; we hope you brought some food with you because you’re in for a long wait.

Unsurprisingly, Apple didn’t mention that this iPhone is brought to you in part by the forced labor of thousands of Chinese college students who were made to work at Foxconn to help keep up with Apple’s demand needs prior to launch.

(Apple also announced updates to its iPod line and to iTunes, but there wasn’t anything there that’s particularly significant for Asia specifically.)

[Image via Engadget liveblog; info via Engadget and Ars Technica]

One rumored iPhone 5 design. We'll see the real thing in just a few hours.

Apple’s iPhone 5 announcement is coming in just a few short hours now. But could this be the first Apple device that meets a lukewarm reception in China? To be honest, probably not. We still expect this thing to sell like hotcakes. But it’s worth noting this poll of more than 13,000 Sina Weibo users (h/t to Shanghaiist’s Kenneth Tan for the link) that only 21 percent of them are planning to buy the handset when it comes out.

Of course, 21 percent of weibo users is still an awful lot, but Sina Weibo users are a big part of Apple’s target demographic: they’re young, tech-saavy, and tend to have white-collar jobs and more disposable income than the average Chinese net user. For that reason, I’m a bit surprised the “plan to buy” numbers aren’t a little higher.

Still, we fully expect the iPhone 5 to sell well in China because all Apple devices do. But it’s worth noting that this is the first new Apple handset to be announced since China’s smartphone market became flooded with cheap — but branded and powerful — smartphones from companies like Xiaomi, Shanda, Baidu, and Qihoo among numerous others.

Part of the iPhone’s appeal in China is that it isn’t cheap; it’s a status symbol, and a new model that looks visually different from previous iPhones — as the iPhone 5 is rumored to — should sell very well among the wanting-to-show-off crowd. But I can’t help but wonder if as time goes by, Apple isn’t going to face stiffer challenges from some of these lower-cost domestic competitors. I don’t think that the iPhone 5 is going to face all that much trouble, but it could be the first Apple product to get a real taste of what it’s like to compete with a much stronger domestic market.

[Sina Weibo via @MrKennethTan]

Apple’s new iPhone should be announced this Wednesday. The phone will likely support 4G TD-LTE networks, which means that it could work on China Mobile’s. But according to Sina Tech, numerous sources at the company all denied that China Mobile was even discussing the iPhone 5 internally.

That might come as a surprise to some, but readers with good memories may recall that back in July, China Mobile vice-GM Li Zhengmao said explicitly that China Mobile will not be getting the iPhone until 2014. Apparently, China Mobile is content to build its 4G network without what is likely to be one of the most popular 4G handsets, and Apple fans will just have to wait a couple more years to see their precious device on China Mobile.

Or, of course, they could just jailbreak it, which is what China Mobile subscribers have been doing with iPhones for years. Despite the fact that current-gen iPhones can’t access China Mobile’s 3G network, the company still has tens of millions of iPhone users who have jailbroken their phones so that their China Mobile cards will work in the device. It sounds like there’s no hope for a China Mobile iPhone 5, and probably not even a China Mobile iPhone 6, so it looks like people will have to keep jailbreaking for the foreseeable future.

[via Sina Tech]

Woo, college!

You may already be aware of a report (available in English in the Shanghai Daily, among other places) that suggests Apple-and-everyone-else-supplier Foxconn was employing “interns” that turned out to be college students who had been forced to participate in the work. From the Shanghai Daily:

A student majoring in computing at the Huaiyin Institute of Technology said 200 students from her school had been driven to the factory.

They started work on the production line last Thursday and were being paid 1,550 yuan (US$243.97) a month for working six days a week, she said.

But they had to pay hundreds of yuan for food and accommodation, she said in an online post under the name of mengniuIQ84.

Several other students from at least five colleges backed up what she said, saying they were being forced to work for 12 hours a day.

That’s bad enough, but the story gets even worse if what some of the students are saying is true. According to mengniuIQ84, local authorities ordered schools to provide the students as “interns” to offset a worker shortage at Foxconn. It’s unclear the extent to which Foxconn and the local government was involved in the “internship” plans, but the reasons for the labor shortage? Foxconn needed more bodies to keep up with Apple’s iPhone 5 production as the device rolls toward its likely official launch later this month. So yeah, that shiny new iPhone 5 you’re planning on buying in a couple weeks might well have been constructed in part by forced student labor.

Facing increased media scrutiny, some schools have already pulled out their students and resumed classes. But not every school is admitting wrongdoing. The Jiangsu Finance and Economics Technical College, for example, has pulled its current batch of “interns” back into classes according to this report. But it had originally been planning to send two additional groups of students to work in the factory; it’s not clear whether those students will still be forced to go or not.

Sadly, this kind of forced internship is not uncommon at Chinese universities, especially technical colleges and lower-ranked schools that are more concerned with collecting tuition payments and other fees than they are about offering students a decent education. Government and school officials have suggested that the internship programs are about broadening students’ horizons and giving them practical job skills. But since many of the students sent to Foxconn have majors like English — majors totally unrelated to work in a high-tech factory — it’s hard to see what the value of this experience would be for most students.

But it works out great for schools — who still get to collect tuition payments — and for Foxconn, which gets cheap bodies to fill spots on the production line to ensure that your iPhone 5 isn’t late to the party later this month. Hurray.

[Shanghai Daily via Sina Tech and CNet; Image Source]

It was just two weeks ago Bubble Motion, the Singapore-based company which makes the popular Bubbly app, raised $5 million in funding from JAFCO Asia. And today we’re pleased to see a major update pushed for its iOS app, bringing some new features to the service which has come to be known as ‘Twitter for voice.’

The most notable of the new features is the added capability to apply filters to your voice messages, which will change the sound depending on which of the filters you choose. In total there are twelve, including Noise Reducer, Slow Mo, Helium, and Echo Chamber. Bubble Motion’s CEO Tom Clayton explains:

With Bubbly now being used around the world, we wanted to add a touch of personalization that anyone can appreciate. […] The Bubbly voice filters give users more options for self-expression – not to mention, it’s a lot of fun.

I can see the potential for fun, although I’m not sure it’s something that I would personally use regularly — and I’m not quite sold on their ‘Instagram for Voice’ comparison. If Bubbly is Twitter for voice, then this function is sort of analogous to adding new text filters (aka ‘fonts’) to Twitter. But of course all users are different, and for some people, I’m sure these new voice filters will be right up their alley.

Bubbly’s other new features will excite many users in Korea, Thailand, and Russia, as the service now gets language localization for those regions.

There’s also the ability to connect Bubbly to your other social networks, with single sign-on for Facebook and Twitter, and Timeline integration for the service so that you can see Bubbly posts there. This should help Bubbly find new audiences as Bubbly audio messages are passed around on the platforms we already use.

It’s good to see Bubbly continue to grow, with more than 19 million members (many of them premium users) already under its umbrella. When we spoke to Tom Clayton back in June he noted that the company was almost profitable, and had tons of cash in reserve.

The application, in addition to providing various information about common tourist attractions nationwide, comes with a location-based augmented reality function that lets you take photos with the uber-cute Japanese icon. This function, depending on your location in Japan, will let you take a photo with one of the many locally-themed Hello Kitty graphics overlaid on your travel photo (see right for the apps screenshot from iTunes).

Speaking of ‘virtually,’ I should note that if you aren’t doing a nationwide tour of Japan (and just doing a trip to one or two places, as I was), then this app is virtually useless because you won’t use it more than a few times.

Could use a sprinkle of social

But there are a lot of opportunities to build on this notion, if a social layer is added.

I really like this location-based collection mechanism, especially if we look at the success that Japanese social game companies have had with card collection/battle games. I can’t help but think back to a conversation I once had with Tonchidot’s Takehiro Iguchi (of Sekai Camera fame) who posited that it would be very cool to one day create a sort of augmented reality Pokemon social game. Players could travel to different places and collect rare Pokemon and then use them as part of their game rather than just use them as badges like with this Hello Kitty app. Such a strategy is probably not the best if you’re limited to just Hello Kitty as a character, but for other franchises — like Pokemon especially — it could be done. Some developers have tried it already in fact, though they were not official.

Photo: entertainment.wikia.com

If only Nintendo, who owns the Pokemon franchise, was more open to bringing its IP onto new platforms…

The notion of gamifying tourism is not a super new idea, and I’m sure there are lots of examples out there of companies who have done it well.

We already saw Japan-based Colopl incorporate such a location-based gaming feature, but I really hope that we see more companies try to do this in the future. Ideally tourism organizations like the JNTA can get involved, and promote Japan in a way that’s not only fun and exciting, but appropriately geeky!