世論 What Japan Thinks

japan.internet.com, in conjunction with a new-to-me company Cross Marketing Inc (ugh, Flash-based survey reports!), performed a survey of 300 mobile phone users (exactly 50:50 male and female) at the start of this month to find out what habits they had regarding mobile phones. 17.3% of the respondents were in their teens (in fact, aged 18 or 19 only), and each of the four decades of age from twenties to fifties were represented by 20.7% of the sample size.

I previously presented another survey that looked at the use of extra features of a mobile phone, but the percentages are quite different between the two. More investigation may be needed to discover why this discrepency has occured, although I wonder if the sample selection method is the problem. The earlier survey was a self-selecting one that would tend to attract heavy users, I suspect, but for this one, although the respondent selection method is not described, given the small survey size and the balanced age grouping, I suspect there is a much more rigourous selection process.

Q1: What optional features on your mobile phone do you often use? (Sample size=300, multiple answer)

Mail	93.0%
Camera	62.0%
Alarm clock	61.7%
Calculator	45.3%
Scheduler	33.3%
Infra-red transmission	16.7%
Bar code or QR code reader	16.0%
Video camera recording	14.7%
Music player	9.0%
TV remote control	5.0%
ToDo list	3.0%
Radio	3.0%
Analog TV tuner	2.7%
OCR	2.0%
Video phone	1.0%
Digital TV reception (1 seg)	0.3%
Other	0.7%
Don’t use any optional features	3.0%

It’s quite an amazingly small number, only one percent regularly using video calling!

Q2: When writing mail on your mobile phone, which hand do you use for input? (Sample size=300)

Dominant hand	58.3%
Non-dominant hand	21.7%
Both hands	13.2%
Favour neither hand	6.8%

Q3: When talking on your mobile phone, to which ear do you hold it to? (Sample size=300)

Dominant hand side’s ear	45.0%
Non-dominant hand side’s ear	45.0%
Favour neither ear	9.7%
Don’t hold it to either ear (use speaker phone, hands-free kit, headset, etc)	0.3%

When asking those in work why they used the non-dominant side’s ear, a frequent answer was that they often write notes whilst talking in the office on a standard phone, so they need to keep the main hand free, and this habit gets carried over to when using mobiles.