Here we go, this is the kind of Pacific push I’m talking about. DoCoMo’s announced that they’re going to be pre-loading the BlackBerry 8707h sometime this summer with Japanese language support. BIS 2.3 featured Japanese as one of the freshly-embedded languages, and on top of that, BES and the desktop manager will be getting the oriental treatment.
With this move, RIM is diving head-first into a market that has yet to show much interest in BlackBerry. This has been in the works since at least October, but really should have been included from the get-go. Japanese character input seems like a pretty basic, no-brainer way of doing business in Japan, don’t you think? Coming out of the gates without language support seriously hurt BlackBerry’s initial release – hopefully its reputation hasn’t been too tarnished over there.
