世論 What Japan Thinks

The 55th regular survey into mobile phone upgrade needs by goo Research and reported on by japan.internet.com found out that a small majority of current standard feature phones would rather keep using them than upgrade to a smartphone; I would have thought that more would want to stay with feature phones.

Demographics

Between the 18th and 20th of April 2011 exactly 1,000 mobile phone-using members of the goo Research monitor panel completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.5% of the sample were male, 1.4% in their teens, 12.8% in their twenties, 29.9% in their thirties, 30.8% in their forties. and 25.1% aged fifty or older.

Furthermore, the report highlights that according to a separate survey 49% of women in their twenties and seven-tenths in their teens want a smartphone, which perhaps suggests why Panasonic are this summer bringing out the P-07C My First Smartphone

Talking of SoftBank, here’s an English lesson from them:

Research results

Q1: Which mobile carrier do you use? If more than one, choose the main one. (Sample size=1,000)

NTT docomo	47.3%
au by KDDI	28.2%
SoftBank	21.5%
Willcom	3.0%
E-Mobile	0.0%

When asked to select which from a list were important when upgrading their mobile phone, handset price was tops with 68.6% rating it important, 60.4% indicated design, and 33.2% functionality, the same order as in the last two surveys, although functionality dropped a perhaps significant 3.8 percentage points. One other interesting data point was that data packet cost has been steadily rising in importance, a feature which I’d like to see correlated with desire for smartphones.

When asked to select which from a list of services whose presence or absense was important when upgrading their mobile phone, the top choice was a flat-rate pake-hodai plan, with 44.4% choosing it. Second was navigation features, with just 12.9% bothered with it.

Q2: Which do you want to upgrade to, a feature phone or a smartphone? (Sample size=1,000)

Using smartphone, don’t want to switch to feature phone	9.3%
Using smartphone, but want to switch to feature phone	1.3%
Using feature phone, don’t want to switch to smartphone	43.2%
Using feature phone, but want to switch to smartphone	38.3%
Using both smartphone and feature phone, and want to keep using both	7.9%