One of Japan's top cell phone innovators says that for all his country's technological prowess, it could never have produced the iPhone.
Japan's telecommunications industry stifles the kind of creativity that is so apparent in Apple Inc.'s Web-surfing phone, said Takeshi Natsuno, who developed Japan's first Internet-linking cell phone service, i-mode, in 1999, when such systems were still ground-breaking.
"This is a great device," he said, affectionately fingering a black iPhone 3G during an interview Thursday. "This kind of device cannot be produced by Japanese manufacturers. Never."