iPhone 3GS ranked #1 in cellphone sales in Japan... for now.

TG Daily (via Fortune) is reporting that Japanese market research company BCN's latest rankings of cellphone sales in Japan are showing that Apple's smartphone is the the current market leader in that country.

I did a quick check at BCN this afternoon while writing this post, and the iPhone 3GS 32GB is listed in first place in sales (see screenshot at right), with the iPhone 3GS 16GB in second place. The 3GS was just introduced in Japan on June 26th, and the sales figures are from the week of June 22 - 28. BCN's source of data includes point-of-sale information from many of Japan's largest electronics retailers, including Amazon Japan, Eiden, Bic Camera, K's Denki, and Best Denki.

Akky Akimoto at Asiajin is providing some perspective on the numbers. It's not unusual for a new phone to jump to the top of the list as it is released. As he notes, the Sony Network Walkman was #1 in the BCN ranking of music players at one time in 2005, but for the complete year, Apple iPod had a 60% share of the Japanese market.

Filemaker's Bento [ MacOS ]

When Filemaker introduced Bento, the 'relational database for the rest of us,' at Macworld Expo this year, the response from the marketplace was pretty solid; as of August, the $49 multipurpose data organizer had been downloaded over 400,000 times. Still, the product was a clear 1.0 with a lot of room for new features and improvements; that's what Filemaker is looking to deliver with Bento 2, announced today and on sale immediately.

The big shift in B2 is the enhanced interaction with the data sources that contribute to your Bento collections. Need to include Mail.app messages in a layout along with contact info? Drag-and-drop them in, easy as can be. Want an RSS feed or your iCal data too? No problem. You can also sort and search your data in an iTunes-esque "Smart Collections" mode that should be familiar to novice users.

One of the top requests from Bento 1 users was for better spreadsheet integration, and Filemaker has added copy/paste support and improved import/export for Excel and Numbers; spreadsheets can be sorted and tweaked with ease, especially in the new split table/layout view. Surprisingly (to me anyway), AppleWorks import capability was also near the top of the feature request list; it's been added as well.

Bento's look has been revved up with 10 new themes; new in v2 is the ability to directly edit the layout of a database without switching into a layout-specific mode (just drag the field titles around). Address views now support AIM/iChat directly, and Google Maps integration is built-in. If you have rich media content that needs to travel with your database, you can embed it by option-dragging it onto the layout (a conventional drag creates a relative link to the media on your hard drive). Printing has been enhanced with new report modes, and the option to save a 'clone' template (no data records, just the schema and layouts) has been added.

Filemaker's customer research has been demonstrating a wide and diverse audience for Bento, from pilots and fashion boutiques to eBay mavens and goat herders. It's a pretty good bet that if your needs include a light, single-user and simple database app, Bento will be a match for you.

Bento 2 is $49 for one license and $99 for a family pack; through 10/27, it's available exclusively at the Apple Store or via store.filemaker.com. Bento 2 is a Universal Binary and requires Mac OS X 10.5.4 or higher.

OpenOffice 3 [ MacOS ]

OpenOffice has released version 3 of its eponymous open-source alternative to Microsoft Office, which includes a native version for Mac OS X.

According to Insanely Great Mac, the software includes:

• ODF 1.2 Support
• Microsoft Office 2007 Import Filters
• Solver component which allows solving optimization problems
• Support for displaying custom error bars and regression equations
• Improved Crop Feature in Draw and Impress

The software is only available for Macs with Intel processors. There are projects for converting OpenOffice for PowerPC, but an official version was not included in this 3.0.0 release.
OpenOffice's site was running very slowly this morning due to overwhelming demand for the new software, but the official download link is here. There are mirrors available, and this one seemed to work for me. For Mac users, the file to download includes MacOSXIntel_AQUA_install in the name.

The download is 163MB.

Apple goes Nvidia with MacBooks

The day we gamers have been waiting for is finally here -- Apple is announcing at their event right now that the new MacBooks (and presumably Pros) that they'll be releasing will have Nvidia graphics chips inside them, finally replacing the integrated graphics chips that have been the bane of 3D gamers on the Mac for years and years. The "NVIDIA GeForce 9400 M" boasts 16 parallel graphic cores, and 54gflops of graphics performance.

This couldn't be better news for Mac gamers -- The new chips offer 6x the performance in terms of 3D graphics that the old chips did, and while that level of 3D performance probably still won't be able to go toe-to-toe with the very fastest of 3D gaming PC rigs, it does mean that World of Warcraft and all of the other popular 3D games on the Mac will run faster than ever before.

Update: Looks like that's not the only chip in there -- the Nvidia 9600M GT will offer more power (and less battery life), and it looks like both will be included on the MBP, with an option for double the graphics memory.