EDITOR'S NOTE: Dylan Tweney here. I'm the senior editor in charge of Gadget Lab, and I'd like to explain what happened with this story and offer Wired.com's statement about it.

Since this story was first published on Feb. 26 we have received a lot of feedback questioning our reporting and conclusions. We agree with some of the criticism and have updated and corrected parts of the story in response. Nevertheless, those errors aside, we believe the main thrust of the story is essentially correct. In short, there is good evidence the iPhone is not selling as well in Japan as it is elsewhere, thanks in part to demanding and specific Japanese expectations and tastes in mobile phone devices. Much of that evidence still stands.

However, there were problems with the way we used two of our sources, and with how we handled the corrections we made.

The first of those sources was a quote from Nobiyuki Hayashi that had originally appeared in an earlier Wired.com story, "In Japan, Cellphones Have Become Too Complex to Use."

Later in the day we added a statement by Daiji Hirata, taken from the same article. It's not unusual in journalism to cite statements from earlier stories -- and to quote from stories published by others -- but in this case, we clumsily paraphrased Mr. Hirata's and Mr. Hayashi's statements, misconstruing what they had originally said.

The statement that carrying an iPhone "could make you look pretty lame" is our conclusion, not Mr. Hirata's or Mr. Hayashi's.

We also used their statements out of context, which compounded the errors; and we didn't make it crystal clear that we took Mr. Hirata's and Mr. Hayashi's statements from an earlier story.

Mr. Hayashi did respond to an e-mail inquiry from us, but we didn't receive his response until Friday, Feb. 27, after the story appeared. His email made it clear that the iPhone, despite several well-publicized problems, is doing better than expected, but that it still falls short for the Japanese market in several key areas. Mr. Hayashi spells out his view of the iPhone's pros and cons on his blog.

We updated the story on Friday, Feb. 27, to try and correct these misattributions, but again, we didn't make it crystal clear what changes we made to the story and why. We've made one more set of changes today to make the context and meaning of Mr. Hayashi's quote plainer and to make it even clearer that Mr. Hirata's statement came from the earlier story.

Wired.com regrets the errors, and we apologize to Mr. Hayashi and Mr. Hirata for misconstruing their statements.

We also apologize to you, the readers. Errors happen, on Wired.com as elsewhere. But we mishandled the situation by not disclosing, here on Gadget Lab, exactly what changes we were making.

We made the corrections in a good-faith attempt to correct errors in the story, but without making it clear to the public what changes were made and why. In so doing, we violated your trust. In the future, we'll be far more transparent about disclosing those corrections as we make them.

One more thing: we could have discussed the edits and the feedback from Mr. Hirata and  Mr. Hayashi in the comments. However, I closed the comments on this story on Friday afternoon because they were turning into a cesspool of racial invective.

We welcome vigorous debate and disagreement in our comments, but we will delete hate speech and off-topic invective. I have reopened comments on this post, but will close them again if necessary.

We do acknowledge the important role that our critics, including Apple Insider, played in pointing out the errors in this article.

As always, we welcome your feedback and strive to correct errors whenever we make them.