世論 What Japan Thinks

Despite the iPhone having an almost 18 month head start on Android, according to this survey from goo Research, reported on by japan.internet.com, into mobile devices (the 9th time this regular survey has been conducted) Android and Android-derived OS users now equal iPhone users.

Demographics

Between the 25th and 28th of April 2011 1,080 members of the goo Research online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.6% of the sample were male, 15.8% in their teens, 18.1% in their twenties, 21.8% in their thirties, 16.4% in their forties, and 27.9% aged fifty or older.

I have another marketplace-based survey that I will translate later that shows that Android is outselling iPhone, which of course is implied by the results of this survey.

Note that until last autumn about the only Android devices available were lower-end HTC devices and a couple of local attempts, all of which were very poor compared to the iPhone, and hopeless when compared to the Japanese standard feature phone. However, now every Japanese manufacturer is now in the game, and the features that Japanese consumers expect, namely One Seg digital television, Osaifu Keitai electronic cash and deco-mail (HTML mail) are available. Furthermore, the iPhone is only available from SoftBank, which has just 20% of the handset market, whereas SoftBank plus the other two big players, docomo and au, have huge numbers of Android-based phones.

Just today, in fact, docomo announced their summer models, with 9 new smartphones, including Panasonic’s interesting (but very, very girlie) interface that supports one-handed operation, an essential feature for train riders.

Thumb interface:

OMG hearts:

Girlie Twitter:

Finally, note that Galapagos is Sharp’s own customised Android version – they cannot use the Google trademarks due to the heavy customising they have done.

Research results

First, people were asked excluding mobile phones, what mobile devices they had. Top was the Nintendo DS (it’s not clear if that included the 3DS) with 42.7%, then normal laptop with 19.8%, Sony PSP with 18.8%, and smartphone with 15.3%, then various other also-rans. The smartphone figure is up from 12.1% in January.

Q1: What kinds of smartphone do you have? (Sample size=165, multiple answer)

	Votes	Percentage
iPhone series	80	48.5%
Android	73	44.2%
W-ZERO3 series	10	6.1%
GALAPAGOS	7	4.2%
Windows Mobile	5	3.0%
Blackberry	0	0.0%
Other	0	0.0%

Android has over doubled since January, and iPhone is down almost 10% (7 people), although that could perhaps be explained away as being within the margin of error for the two surveys.