世論 What Japan Thinks

infoPLANT recently carried out a survey to find out what people do with their mobiles (other than phone calls and mail, of course) and what they want their next mobile to do. By means of an option placed within the public iMode service menus for twelve days in the middle of December they got 7,905 respondents to their questions, 37% male. More detailed demographics were not available.

In my case, the calculator feature is about the only one I use with any degree of frequency, although I am rather controlled by my wife’s phone’s alarm and schedule! I do have a number of ring tones downloaded, but as my phone is in manner mode nearly all the time, that probably doesn’t count. For my next phone, the one feature I perhaps want most of all would be a smoother input method, but not voice-based, as that would be far too embarrassing on the train!

It would be interesting to see how these figures compared with a similar survey performed in Europe or the USA.

Q1: Of all the features available within your current mobile phone, please select all of the ones you regularly use. (Sample size=7,905, multiple answer)

	All	Male N=2,927	Female N=4,978
Alarm	85.4%	80.7%	88.1%
Still camera	83.3%	74.6%	88.3%
Ring tones (MIDI etc based)	81.6%	77.3%	84.2%
Calculator	79.8%	69.6%	85.8%
Games	66.4%	68.7%	65.0%
Bar code or QR code reader	54.0%	50.5%	56.1%
Ring tunes, videos (MP3 etc based)	50.7%	48.2%	52.2%
Schedule	50.7%	46.9%	52.9%
Infra-red transfer	46.0%	37.6%	51.0%
Motion camera	43.0%	35.5%	47.4%
Non-game applet	41.1%	44.6%	39.1%
Decomail	37.6%	22.8%	46.4%
Music playback	22.8%	21.8%	23.4%
Remote control	21.9%	23.3%	21.1%
Television viewing	17.2%	15.7%	18.0%
Melody call	12.4%	13.5%	11.8%
Electronic money	8.9%	13.8%	6.0%
Electronic books or manga	6.9%	5.0%	8.0%
None of the above	0.3%	0.6%	0.2%

I wonder why almost 25% more women use the calculator on their phones. Does this represent a difference in lifestyle patterns such as more often splitting a bill or doing the household accounts?

Looking at the detailed age breakdown, there are the expected trends that older people are less likely to use each feature, with ring tones (MIDI-based, not MP3-based) being the only feature that bucks this trend, perhaps because younger people (by almost three to one for the teenagers versus over fifties) much prefer to use higher-quality ring tunes. Other features that teenagers choose in much greater quantity than the other age groups is infra-red, music playback and decomail, for teenage girls only. Melody call, though, seems most popular with men in their forties and fifties and over, with 17.6% and 19.8% respectively, significantly higher than the average.

Q2: Select one feature or service that would be good to be included in a mobile phone in future. (Sample size=7,905, free answer)

Rank	Feature
1	Television
2	GPS navigation
3	Train or bus season ticket, pass card
4	Key
5	Radio
6	Anti-crime buzzer
7	Insurance schedule, license or other electronic certificate
8	Dictionary
9	Solar battery recharger
10	Mirror
11	Automatic charger or infinite battery
12	PC web site viewer
13	Reduced cost or free handset or usage fees
14	Music recording, playback
15	Talk time or packet fees fixed pricing plan
16	Rich emoji features
17	Biometric-based or other high-security features
18	Home appliance remote control
19	Quality camera
20	Video (playback I think)
21=	Text-to-speech and speech-to-text for mail, etc
21=	Voice recorder
23	Quality ring tunes features
24	Torch
25	Large memory
26	Translation
27	Credit card
28	Water-resistance
29	Timer
30	Thermometer, humidity meter

Only about a third of these features are not widely available. Number 10, a mirror, may seem like a strange request, but after the mobile phone, preening one’s hair is the favourite passtime in the train, or so it seems to me. In fact, only just two weeks ago I saw a woman putting on makeup using her phone’s camera as a makeshift mirror!