世論 What Japan Thinks

japan.internet.com published the results of a survey performed in the middle of August by Cross Marketing Inc into the use of mobile phone email. As usual for this company, they interviewed 150 men and 150 women who owned mobile phones by means of a private internet survey. One sixth were in their teens, twenties, and so on up to the sixties. Although the full survey covered many aspects of mobile phone email, this extract concerns just sending email.

This is another of these surveys that in itself is perhaps not too interesting in itself, especially to one who is not a resident of Japan, but as I was translating I could relate it to how I have seen others use email and have realised their way of using is not really that odd after all.

For me, nearly all my email (around five per day) is to my wife, and her address is set up as a kind of shortcut, so I think I’d be in the “Other” group for Q3.

Q1: How often do you send email from your mobile phone? (Sample size=300)

Never send email	0.3%
Occasionally send email	25.3%
Once a week	7.7%
Once every two or three days	18.3%
Once a day	13.7%
Two or three times a day	18.0%
Four to ten times a day	10.0%
Ten or more a day	6.7%

Q2: About how long an email do you write on your mobile phone? (Sample size=300)

Just one or two words	4.3%
About a line	9.7%
Two or three lines	36.3%
Four or five lines	33.0%
Six or more lines	16.7%

Q3: In what way do you most often select the mail address to send mail to? (Sample size=300)

Use ‘reply to mail’ function	50.3%
Recall from address book	39.7%
Use sent mail history function	8.7%
Directly enter address	1.0%
Other	0.3%

Note that the first answer covers both doing a direct reply to a previous message and deleting the subject line and body in order to start a brand new message. When people have hundreds of address book entries and poor searching facilities for them, just grabbing the address from a previous email would seem to be more convenient for users. Perhaps we will soon see an extra options on phones, “Compose new message to this address”?