世論 What Japan Thinks

japan.internet.com recently reported on goo Research’s 31st regular mobile phone upgrade needs survey.

Demographics

Between the 27th and 28th of April 2007 exactly 1,000 members of goo Research’s online monitor group who were mobile phone users successfully completed an online questionnaire. 54.0% were female, 2.3% in their teens, 18.4% in their twenties, 41.3% in their thirties, 23.1% in their forties, and 14.9% aged fifty or older.

With the launch of NTT DoCoMo’s 904i series of phones having taken place just four or five days before this survey was conducted, the awareness of the new models seems very high! This new series’ main features seem to be two phone lines in the one handset – not a new feature to the mobile world, but the first time a full model range has suported it – and Napster support for unlimited music downloads. This feature also was previously available in some of the 903i phones, but now for the first time all the phones in te one range support it.

Looking at the answers to Q3, it seems the Sharp AQUOS brand is still strong.
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Nepro Japan recently reported on an interesting report on parent-child relationships and email. This perhaps could be considered a follow-up to a previous survery on how people have seen society change due to mobiles.

Demographics

Between the 5th and 6th of April 2007 Nepro Japan collected 3,866 responses through a menu option available through the public menu systems of NTT DoCoMo’s iMode, SoftBank’s Yahoo Keitai and au’s EZweb. 42% of this self-selecting survey was male, 3% in their teens, 36% in their twenties, 42% in their thirties, and 18% aged forty or older.

Not being a parent, and not having a parent in this country, I cannot comment on any personal experiences.

In Q1 there seems to be rather a lot of orphans! Perhaps it includes people who have fallen out of touch with their parents.
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infoPLANT recently reported on a short but interesting survey they conducted into what people usually carry with them, excluding mobile phones and cash.

Demographics

Over a week between the 10th and 17th of April 2007, infoPLANT collected 7,038 self-selecting respondents to a survey available through the DoCoMo iMode mobile phone menuing system. 35.3% of the sample was male, 6.7% female. For the results persented below, the 173 people, or 2.5% who carried nothing with them were eliminated.

I would love to have seen them ask about mirrors, as it seems that the vast majority of women in trains, and quite a few men, have them stuffed away in their bags for emergency make-up sessions.
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japan.internet.com recently reported on a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research into mobile phone web browser awareness issues. The article reported on here focused mainly on mobile search.

Demographics

Between the 20th and 23rd of April 2007 330 PC using members of JR Tokai Express Research’s monitor panel completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 54.8% of the sample was female, 18.2% in their twenties, 40.9% in their thirties, 27.0% in their forties, 10.3% in their fifties, and 3.6% in their sixties.

I’ve only used mobile search once or twice just to see how it worked, and I used Google’s mobile portal to do the search. It was relatively successful, and it also offered a railway timetable look-up service specifically for Japan, but even though I was using a new Japanese mobile phone, the encoding was all wrong and I just for question marks instead of kanji. Since that experiment, however, I’ve never had the urge to search again.

Note that the “full browser” mentioned in Q1 refers to using a browser that attempts to render standard web pages completely. I’m not sure what the exact qualifications for a full browser is, but I would expect CSS, Javascript and frames at least to be supported. Note that this site can render in some of the newer non-full standard mobile phone browsers, and commenting even works, but all my CSS and Javascript elements are not rendered. Also note that some mobile phones come with full browsers as standard, but for other phones a separate browser needs to be downloaded. In addition, NTT DoCoMo call their service “Full Browser”, au’s is “PC Site Viewer”, and SoftBank’s is “PC Site Browser”.
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Between the 1st and 5th of April 2007 MyVoice looked at the use of mobile phone address books.

Demographics

17,310 members of the MyVoice internet community completed a private internet-based survey. 54% were female, 2% in their teens, 19% in their twenties, 39% in their thirties, 26% in their forties, and 14% in their fifties.

Note that almost all Japanese mobile phones come with phone book facilities, with the latest models providing facilities such as multiple phone numbers and email addresses per name, photographs, physical addresses, web addresses, and additional notes.

When I last upgraded it was a cheap upgrade through work, so I didn’t get my address book copied, and although I borrowed the latest version of a mobile phone backup package that claimed to support my phone, it failed miserably to copy due to the cable not working correctly, so instead I had to resort to using my miniSD to backup and restore, but still it couldn’t keep group information intact over the transfer even though I was changing from DoCoMo mova to DoCoMo FOMA. My wife had similar mail group issues at an official DoCoMo shop. Because groups are such a basic feature, it really it pretty disappointing that shops can’t copy that information, as I’m sure that perhaps puts people off upgrading, knowing that they have to tweak all their address book settings.
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infoPLANT recently published a survey that looked into the usage of fee-charging mobile phone sites. The fieldwork for the self-selecting survey was conducted over a week from the 3rd to 10th of April 2007.

Demographics

5,207 people chose to fill out a public questionnaire available through the NTT DoCoMo iMode menuing system. 39.4% of the sample was male, 3.2% in their teens, 31.0% in their twenties, 43.4% in their thirties, 19.0% in their forties, and 3.4% aged fifty or older.

This survey is notable for one figure I’d been hoping to find in regards to infoPLANT, namely how many of their respondents are on fixed-price data programs, or パケ放題, pakehoudai, plans as they are known in Japanese. This survey had five in six of the respondents on these deals. This higher than I expected figure should always be borne in mind when reading future or past infoPLANT self-selecting iMode surveys, as this class of user does not need to worry about, for instance, the rather horrendously large bill that can be run up downloading an audio track; nearly 9,000 yen on a standard plan for a 5 megabyte audio file, and still around 450 yen on DoCoMo’s best discounted packet deals. Investigating further, the percentage of customers who have unlimited packet plans was around 27% as of September 2006 (see page 27) and about 30% at the end of 3Q 2006 (31st December 2006) (see page 2), so one can see the bias inherent in this kind of open survey conducted by infoPLANT.

Also note, even if you are on an unlimited packet program, if you use your mobile phone as a modem, these data packets are not free; stories have been recently circulating about people not reading the fine print correctly and running up over a million yen in data transmission charges!
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japan.internet.com recently published the results of research conducted by JR Tokai Express Research into the use of melody calls. This is the service (and a trademark of NTT DoCoMo) whereby when someone calls a phone, instead of getting a standard tone, instead music selected by the phone owner gets played, a sort of reverse ringtone for the caller instead of the callee.

Demographics

Between the 4th and 9th of April 2007 330 members of JR Tokai Express Research’s monitor group answered a private internet-based questionnaire. 47.3% of the sample was male, 21.8% in their twenties, 38.5% in their thirties, 20.3% in their forties, 14.2% in their fifties, and 5.2% in their sixties.

Currently only NTT DoCoMo and au by KDDI support this feature. The DoCoMo feature is named “Melody Call”, and au’s translates as “EZ Waiting Music”. SoftBank does not offer such a service. In March DoCoMo reported they attained over 10 million subscribers to the service, whereas au reported 1 million contracts. However, DoCoMo offers a feature package of Melody Call plus answer phone, call waiting and call forwarding for a price only 100 yen more expensive than the standard answer phone service, so perhaps their extremely high figures can be attributed to people buying the package and getting the Melody Call bundled rather than suggesting a huge desire for the feature alone. Indeed, with only 13.6% of users in this survey reporting that they are currently using the service I suspect there is a significant percentage of people who are not actually aware or have forgotton that they signed up to it.

I’ve personally never heard a melody call ring tone, but that’s probably because I don’t make many outgoing calls.
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japan.internet.com reported on a survey conducted by Cross Marketing Inc into mobile phone body types. Previous surveys have indicated the Japanese love for both clamshell designs and skinny models.

Demographics

Over the 11th and 12th of April 2007 300 members of Cross Marketing’s online monitor pool successfully completed a private internet-based survey. All the respondents were mobile phone users living in Tokyo and the surrounding area. As usual for Cross Marketing, there was a 50:50 male and female split, and 20.0% in their teens, 20.0% in their twenties, 20.0% in their thirties, 20.0% in their forties, and 20.0% in their fifties.

I was surprised to see only one person say they had a Sharp’s AQUOS Keitai. This is the best selling phone design, featuring a quite stunning hinge that they call the Cycloid, it seems. The phone opens like a clamshell, but then the screen can be rotated 90 degrees around a central pivot to allow the user to watch One Seg television in landscape mode.
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Between the first and fifth of March this year, yet another survey that MyVoice conducted was into the matter of water-resistant mobile phones.

Demographics

15,771 members of their online community successfully completed the survey. 54% were female, 2% in their teens, 19% in their twenties, 39% in their thirties, 26% in their forties, and 14% in their fifites.

I must say this is perhaps the oddest mobile phone topic I’ve translated! The only waterproof mobiles I know are the rather chunky and masculine G-Shock watch-inspired G’zOne Casio mobile phones, although I don’t know what the situation is regarding just splash resistance in other handsets. I’ve never given mobile phone waterproofing any thought, myself, and quite frankly I worry about those people who seem to want to read ebooks on their mobiles in the bath, and I hope there is no intersection between the group wanting to use in the bath and those wanting to take photos!
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With One Seg digital terrestrial television reception becoming a standard feature on most higher-end mobile phones, infoPLANT decided to look at One Seg viewing habits and intentions. Over one week in the middle of March they gathered 6,871 replies to a publicly available survey accessed through NTT DoCoMo’s iMode menuing system.

Demographics

Of the 6,871 respondents, 62.2% were female, 3.2% in their teens, 31.1% in their twenties, 43.5% in their thirties, 18.6% in their forties, and 3.5% aged fifty or older.

I’ve only ever watched a One Seg mobile through a glass case in a mobile phone shop, but the picture quality is quite remarkable. I’ve also noticed in the last month or so a few people watching television on the train to work, perhaps one person a week or so, usually catching up on the morning news it seems. The three main things putting me off One Seg are the handset prices, size, as the TV receiver makes it a bit chunkier, and battery concerns, as recharging the phone every night or so would get rather tiresome.

I was quite surprised by the results here, as infoPLANT tends to attract those with newer phones, yet less than 4% had actually watched One Seg on their own devices.
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