masaru@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU (Masaru Sugai) (03/11/91)
I posted the question on the activity on Amiga but no avail. So I called up MiQ Japan who carries ads over months on ASCII magazine. FIY, I summarize several infos I got from a sales rep out there. He is a nice guy to take up nearly 30 minites for my non-profitable questions. Here it goes. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- DISCALIMER THE REPORT BELOW SHOULD NOT BE TAKEN AS OFFICAL ANNOUNCEMENT OF MIQ JAPAN NOR COMMODORE JAPAN UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. I WORK FOR NEC CORPORATION, BUT THIS REPORT IS SUBMITTED FROM MY PERSONAL INTEREST, AND BY NO EVENTS SHOULD BE RELATED TO MY EMPLOYER. DEALERSHIP & SERVICE - Commodore Japan delegates its dealership management to MiQ Japan, and MiQ takes care of warranty and update services. (Could any guy in Commodore tell me Commodore subsidiaries in Asia? My monitor, FD drive, and fan are whining at midnight due to homesick :) - Person who have bought Amiga from non-authroized dealers might have repair service at premium. I didn't asked him in depth, but I guess it won't be a rip-off like Apple, as fortunately we don't have Kanji OS :) - You can just plug in your Amiga to outlets without any transformer. There is no Japanese model of Amiga !(bravo) You need adapters because earth line is not popular in Japan, though. - They deal with only A3000/25, A2000 and A500. A3000/16 is out of service due to little demand from market. - CDTV will be available very soon, but they are waiting for enough CD-ROM credits readied. - There is no authorized dealers for 3rd party venders such as NewTek, but MiQ might acquire dealership in future. USERS - Most of Amiga users seem to be people in mass media who love "something novel". There are no Japanese Amiga mags, but "such people are intellectual enough to read through AmigaWorld, Info, and so on." - There is an active user group in Osaka, and they have regular meeting in Osaka and Tokyo. (Does anybody on net knows their whereabouts ? And does this newsgroup go around to Japan ? I haven't seen any response from Japan as of yet.) - There used to be another Amiga user group in Tokyo, mainly supported by foreigners (sorry for improper word), but no more. JAPANESE SOFTWARE - As reviewed in ASCII magazine, there is a Japanese editor, "XED". You need at least 1MB, and it also works with WB2.0. An interestig feature is that it can create video fonts. Presumably, XED is not a full-fledged Japanese wordprocessor. - MiQ could take contact you with any developers in Japan(most of them are small sotware house, though). PUBLIC RELATIONS - There is a midnight TV program which uses constantly Amiga for CG. 'Einstein', "a scientific entertainment" (Neither have I any idea :) on 8 in Tokyo has lots of Amiga CG scenes. - They came out with Amiga in International Multimedia Conference last October. He was not specific about the future presentation plan in major trade expos, such as Tokyo Business Show next May. -- -- Masaru Sugai:set disclaimer... Cambrige St: $HEADERS$ NEC Corporation:sugai@ccs.mt.nec.co.jp (TOKYO): I wanna be a big cog in wheels. MIT R.Affiliate:masaru@media-lab.media.mit.edu: (from a TV ad in Japan)
djh@neuromancer.metaphor.com (Dallas J. Hodgson) (03/14/91)
When my wife and I were in Japan, the only Amiga dealer we could find (they do repairs, too) was Computer Science near Tokyo. Amigas and Macs are very hard to find. -- +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Dallas J. Hodgson | "These days, you have to be pretty | | Metaphor Computer Systems | technical before you can even | | Mountain View, Ca. | aspire to crudeness." | | USENET : djh@metaphor.com | - William Gibson | +============================================================================+ | "The views I express are my own, and not necessarily those of my employer" | +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+