世論 What Japan Thinks

A new research company to me, Rakuten Research, carried out this recent survey on the use of mobile contents and services, the 18th time they’ve carried it out, but the first time I’ve heard of it!

The survey was carried out at the start of this month amongst Rakuten Research’s monitor group; 2,460 people were selected, almost exactly 50:50 of each sex, with 2,074 of them (86.4%) being mobile phone users from the four main networks, DoCoMo, au, VodaFone and TU-KA. Unless otherwise noted, the sample size for questions are these 2,074 mobile phone users. The main areas of the survey was to find out about the use of “full browsers”, meaning mobile phone browsers that can view PC-based contents, the views on mobile phone information leakage, and communications with eldery parents. However, they have split the results reporting into two articles, so this report is about full browers only. Note that I have translated another survey regarding full browsers.

Q1: Have you used a full browser on your mobile?

All (N=2,074)	9.5%
Male (N=1,042)	12.5%
Female (N=1,032)	6.6%

Q2: For those answering yes to Q1, within the last month, what sorts of web sites have you accessed with the full browser? (Sample size=202, multiple answer)

Search or portal site	46.0%
News or general info site	37.1%
Traffic, maps or travel	26.7%
Shopping	21.8%
Blog	19.8%
Bulletin board	18.3%
Auction	17.8%
Single-function service (dictionary, translation, etc)	10.4%
Other	7.9%

Q3: For those answering yes to Q1, after using the full browser, how has your frequency of access to mobile phone-targetted sites changed? (Sample size=202)

Hardly ever access previously-used mobile sites	35.1%
Frequency of access of mobile sites has decreased	13.4%
Frequency of access of mobile sites has not changed	42.1%
Frequency of access of mobile sites has increased	9.4%

Q4: For those answering yes to Q1, after using the full browser, how has your frequency of access to mobile phone-targetted pay sites changed? (Sample size=202)

Now never access previously-used paid-for mobile contents	47.0%
Amount spend on paid-for mobile contents has decreased	15.3%
Amount spend on paid-for mobile contents has not changed	30.2%
Amount spend on paid-for mobile contents has increased	7.4%

Q5: What issues might crop up (or have cropped up) as a result of using a full browser? (Sample size=2,074, multiple answer)

Packet charge increase	60.8%
Phone screen size too small	44.3%
Corrupted character encodings or screen layout broken	28.1%
Few usable features	25.9%
Worry about viruses or accessing dodgy sites	25.5%
Response from web servers slow	25.3%
Poor usability	20.6%
Cannot view Javascript or Flash-based high-spec sites	15.9%
Others	2.4%
No particular problems or worries	19.2%

Finally, the trends of usage patterns of various major features of mobile phones were investigated. For each of the main functions of the phone, each respondent was asked if they had used it within the last month. Looking back at the historical data the following trends can be seen:

• Picture mail usage has increased from 36.4% to 40.5% in the last two months
• Bar code and QR Code scans are up from 17.6% to 21.5%
• Infrared usage also up from 14.4% to 16.6%
• Usage of all other features up, but none very significantly
• However, electronic money feature usage is still less than 2%