世論 What Japan Thinks

Since it’s just the end of the Japan summer holiday season, let’s have a look at this timely survey from goo Ranking into what uses Japanese would like to make of their mobile phones overseas.

Demographics

Over the 6th and 7th of June 2011 1,148 members of the goo Research online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 50.6% of the sample were male, 12.1% in their teens, 16.9% in their twenties, 28.0% in their thirties, 25.4% in their forties, 9.7% in their fifties, and 7.9% aged sixty or older. Note that the score in the results refers to the relative number of votes for each option, not a percentage of the total sample.

The one time I used my mobile phone overseas all I used was SMS as proper email and all other uses involving data packets are horrendously expensive; one SMS in itself was 100 yen, and although email data packets would be cheaper for the equivalent 140 SMS characters, email would encourage my wife to start pasting in decomail icons or attaching photos…

Talking of photos, searching Flickr gives me absolutely nothing useful, sorry…

Ranking result

Q: What would you like to use your mobile phone overseas for? (Sample size=1,148)

Rank		Score
1	Sending email to friends and family	100
2	Using maps to look uo routes	98.7
3	Gathering information on restaurants, sightseeing	92.0
4	Talking on the telephone	89.2
5	Taking photos	78.1
6	Using it instead of a watch, alarm clock	72.5
7	Checking the weather	69.0
8	Checking Japan news	67.7
9	Using a dictionary function	64.9
10	Using a translation app or web translation site	63.2
11	Taking movies	48.1
12	Tweeting	39.0
13	Updating mixi, Facebook, other SNS	38.1
14	Listening to music	35.9
15	Using memo function	35.5
16	Performing scheduling	34.8
17	Updating blog	26.4
18	Playing mobile games	15.8