The iPhone has been a hotly awaited item in Japan. We didn't really pay attention to the warning that most Japanese wouldn't buy the phone, because having an internal battery seemed like a bit of a silly sticking point. Well, we've found that Japan is not in fact buying up these Apple goodies, forcing retailers to slash prices much quicker than they expected or want to.

Why, you might ask? Well, it's all because of Japanese emoticons, called e-moji or kao-moji. When I would text in Japan, my Japanese friends were curious why I didn't extensively use emoticons in my messages, while theirs sometimes had more emoticons than kanji. Hell, even my host mother, who's in her 70s, would use them all the time!

And so, the sticking point is all because the iPhone really doesn't do kao-moji all that well. When people try to message each other, either the entire message becomes an attachment, or the icons are just converted into meaningless symbols. There's also the fact that there isn't anywhere to hang cell phone charms on the phone, along with some other reasons that WhatJapanThinks highlights.

Think this is totally silly, or are they right to be enraged by constantly screwed up text messages?