(Courtesy of Paint.It.Black’s Flickr site.)

Remember when I told you guys of my experience at Apple Store Ginza in Tokyo a few weeks back? I was thinking during that rainy Friday afternoon for the Leopard launch that it was a bit disconcerting in that I was expecting the line I was in to be long , but not that long (almost 5 blocks!).

Wandering around Tokyo days before, I was already a bit surprised at the ubiquity of Macs, which was more than I was accustomed to in my home base of Manila. They were nearly everywhere I happened to be, and in the big press rooms of the Tokyo Motorshow I attended, nearly half of the journalists were tapping away at Powerbooks, Macbooks and Macbook Pros and iMacs in there.

Well, it seems to not just be a prevalent trend or fad.

Reports have it that Leopard is now the leading OS in Japan with the release of OS X 10.5. The amazing statistic is that Mac OS purchases went up over 60% for October, from 15% percent, which is nothing short of phenomenal. This figure topples Microsoft from the top spot for the first time.

In fact, Microsoft is on the opposite side of the slope, with sales plunging from 75.3% to 28.8% Phenomenal too - in the worst way.

In the six days following the Oct.26 release of Leopard, the new Apple OS now holds the lion’s share (so to speak) with 53.9% of the entire OS-only market. Hoo! Go Japan!

Arigato gozaimasu!

(If you didn’t catch it, read my story of Leopard Day in Japan here.)

I’ve only been excited by two Microsoft-made things lately. One is the Zune 80, and the other is Office 2008 (yeah, yeah, I hear ya - but I live on the darned thing, you know).

Our friends at MacNN have an extensive preview of the new productivity suite on their site. Much as I don’t have an evaluation copy yet and cannot give you a personal review, may I just point you to their wonderful preview?

Click here and here.

Apple is apparently losing ground to Microsoft in the digital media player department - well, at least in one category. According to the latest reviews from reputable sources like PC World, PC Mag, CNet, Wired and YahooTech the newly-released Zune 80 trumps the iPod Classic in almost all departments.

Among the comments are that, for the same price and storage capacity, the Zune 80 is smaller, thinner and lighter, has a larger screen, FM radio, wireless peer-to-peer sharing, wifi syncing with your PC, a great interface, an equally good controller, good battery life, great video performance, a design-customizable back panel and more. Even the Zune Marketplace looks better than the iTunes Store, which Dean Takahashi says looks like a spreadsheet.

This proves you can’t be a loser all the time. Go, Bill!

(I honestly am not sure what these posts about Microsoft digital music players are doing in an Apple-centric blog, except for the fact that these things give us perspective - and make us feel better about our biases.)

More details and official confirmation has come out about the new version of Microsoft’s beleaguered music player. These include:

• pricing - 80gb (harddrive) model costs US$249; the 4gb flash costs US$149, the 8gb US$199; the old 30gb will sell at US$199
• wifi syncing (nice one, actually; no, really)
• the Squircle is real, and is touch sensitive like the iPod’s
• the 80gb version comes only in black, has a 3.2-inch screen and is thinner than the original
• the flash Zunes come in red, green, pink and black
• sorry, none are brown
• no longer WMV-exclusive; you can use h.264 and mpeg4
• squirting is still alive and well
• new sites: Zune Social, Zune Marketplace
• FM Radio
• November launch

Now back to regular programming. (Hey, in case you’d like to know, the iPod Touch started selling at PowerMac Center branches here in Metro Manila beginning this afternoon; the 16gb version goes for around PHP22,900.)