世論 What Japan Thinks

Last month japan.internet.com reported on an opinion poll conducted by goo Research into mobile phones and promotional sites. 1,049 members of goo Research’s monitor pool responded to a private internet-based questionnaire. 58.5% of the sample was female, 1.7% in their teens, 24.4% in their twenties, 41.0% in their thirties, 25.0% in their forties, and 7.9% in their fifties.
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At the start of November MyVoice surveyed its community to find out what they thought about DecoMail. 8,806 people completed the survey; 54% were female, 2% in their teens, 21% in their twenties, 39% in their thirties, 25% in their forties, and 13% in their fifties.

DecoMail is basically HTML email for mobile phones, allowing you to embed photos, graphics and simple HTML font and colour changes, etc into your message. Almost all of the new generation (DoCoMo’s FOMA, Softbank’s 3G and au’s WIN) of mobile phones support the creation of it, and older phones can display it as it gets converted into a web link at some stage in the delivery process. It can also be sent to (and received from?) external mail servers, although the exact process is as yet unclear. As indicated by this poll, it has got a wee bit of a following, and in fact my wife has recently been getting DecoMail from her friends (and from me too) even though her older phone doesn’t support displaying it inline.

I’ve now just sent my account here a test message (resize your broswer to VGA, please…), which arrived as a multi-part MIME message with the first part plain text (with special DoCoMo characters stripped), the second the HTML version, and the remaining parts the inline graphics. That design is a pre-installed template, already complete with the scrolling text (which goes a long way towards getting it its spam rating), awful colours, and all the other hideousnesses! Some of the other templates are even worse…
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japan.internet.com recently reported on a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research into the topic of mobile phone design. 330 members of their monitor pool chose to reply to the private internet-based survey. 64.2% of the sample were male, 18.5% in their twenties, 44.2% in their thirties, 27.0% in their forties, 8.2% in their fifties, and 2.1% in their sixties.

My current mobile is a matt black adult elegance (not quite designer-ish enough to be an art phone) P702iD, but my current favourite design-wise is NEC’s credit card N702iD, especially in the bold red colour. The black “magnetic strip” actually operates as a ticker for mail preview or news headlines, etc.
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infoPLANT recently released the results of an opinion poll they conducted over three days at the start of September this year into the mobile music marketplace. This survey was conducted amongst members of their internet mointor group by means of a private internet-based questionnaire. The demographics targeted youth, with 1,000 people chosen to take part. They were split 500 male, 500 female. 250 of each sex were aged between 15 and 29, 250 between 30 and 39. 150 of each age group used only portable music players (not just digital players, but CD or MD, etc players too), 50 used only mobile phone music players, and 50 used both.

This is really a fascinating set of figures. Q1 indicating that people with both types of devices spend as much on pre-recorded media as the other two groups put together, and over double the combined totals on downloads.

Q2 shows the iPod’s image is unmatched in almost every respect, which puts a damper on people who talk about US companies being unable to compete against the local makers.

Q5 shows that in the digital audio world, unsurprisingly hard disk-based players are the most desired, but then devices with built-in memory are twice as popular as memory card-based devices! The reason for this is unclear, although I wonder if this is to do with people wanting iPod Shuffles and Nanos?
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NEPRO Japan recently conducted a survey into people’s views on children carrying mobile phones. Over one day at the start of October they gathered 3,716 valid responses by means of a self-selecting public survey available through the menuing system of all three major mobile phone carriers, namely DoCoMo’s iMode, au’s EZweb, and Softbank’s Yahoo! Keitai. Demographically, the respondents were 59% female, 2% in their teens, 36% in their twenties, 44% in their thirties, and 18% aged forty or older.

Q4 is an interesting question. As far as I know, in the UK there are a lot of rules regarding the provision of facilities for the blocking of content that mobile phones can access, but I have never heard of such a facility in Japan. The worry about running up big bills is a bit unnecessary, however, as all mobile providers have plans that can cap usage at specific costs. Going shopping online seems another strange worry, but perhaps it also means signing up for too many services with monthly fees?
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With MNP, Mobile Number Portability, having just started in Japan, japan.internet.com reported that JR Tokai Express Research performed a survey into people’s views on MNP. They interviewed just 330 people from their internet monitor group by means of a private internet-based questionnaire. 66.3% of the sample was male, 33.3% female, so where that places the remaining one person, I don’t know! 17.3% were in their twenties, 41.8% in their thirties, 27.3% in their forties, 11.8% in their fifties, and 1.8% in their sixties.

The sample size for Q1SQ is very small, so it is difficult to extrapolate these figures, but it does seem that DoCoMo is the biggest loser and au the biggest winner. This backs up unofficial figures I heard of about 400,000 net loss to DoCoMo, 600,000 gain for au, and 200,000 less customers at Softbank, despite their suicidal price slashing. UPDATE: I was out by a factor of ten or so! This morning’s TV (recalling from memory, so the figures might not be 100% accurate!) said that au gained a net 103,000 customers, DoCoMo lost 75,000, and Softbank 23,000 over the last week. The figures don’t add up because there are also brand new customers included in the overall totals, I believe, and each company perhaps uses different counting methods.

For me, I had enough problem working out how to use my new phone from the same maker and service provider, so I’d be put off taking advantage of MNP and having to learn a whole new service model too!
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japan.internet.com reported on a survey conducted over three days from the 25th to 27th of October, just after MNP, mobile number portability, was introduced, by Cross Marketing Inc into mobile phone bills. They interviewed 300 mobile phone users from their monitor group by means of a private internet opinion poll. The ratio of male to female was exactly 50:50, and exactly a fifth in each of the age bands from teens to ages 50 to 59.

In Q2 I wonder how to interpret the figure for those on data plan discounts. For the talk plan discounts one example given was the Softbank Love Teigaku (fixed price), where for 300 yen per month you can have unlimited voice calls to one other user, so I don’t know if for data plans it was people on unlimited use data packets rather than, for example, DoCoMo’s packet back scheme, which gives you a number of free packets then all extra packets at fractions of the standard price, from one-third to one-twentieth of the normal cost, if I remember correctly.
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With number portability just starting out, and with Softbank’s computer system melting down from the overload of new customers thanks to their, in my opinion, suicidal new pricing scheme (although the small print needs to be carefully read) it may be interesting to look at a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research over four days from the 20th to 23rd of October, just before the new system was introduced, into what mobile phones from each of the three main providers people desire. They interviewed 330 people from their internet monitor group, 67.3% male, 15.5% in their twenties, 41.2% in their thirties, 32.1% in their forties, 9.7% in their fifties, and 1.5% in their sixties.

Even although Softbank offer to honour all transferring customers’ loyalty discounts (we get about 30% to 40% off for ours), I do have a dislike of Yahoo!, and I don’t think these special offers will last that long.
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Over five days at the start of October MyVoice surveyed 12,563 members of their online monitor panel by means of a private internet-based questionnaire on the subject of video calling from mobile phones. The sample was 54% female, 3% in their teens, 21% in their twenties, 39% in their thirties, 25% in their forties, and 12% in their fifties.

My new phone has video calling facilities, but I think I’d be too shy to use it more than just once for the novelty value. I can think of perhaps times when I’m searching for something in the shops and if I phoned up my wife she could help steer me towards the required goods, but one problem in large shops is that there is often no signal, and anyway just sending a photograph may suffice.

Advertising seems to have dropped video calling as a selling point – it’s mostly music, One Seg, and the seemingly doomed Push To Talk that get most publicity time.
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infoPLANT recently released the results of an opinion poll they conducted into what correspondence courses people were currently taking. They used their usual method to gather respondents, namely a publicly available questionnaire through NTT DoCoMo’s iMode menuing system. Over a week at the end of September and the start of October 4,819 self-selecting people completed the survey successfully. 64.3% of the sample was female. Age breakdowns may be seen later.

For those wanting to better themselves in Japanese, applications for this year’s JLPT, Japanese Language Proficiency Test, have already closed, but there’s still time to apply for next February’s 漢字検定, kanji kentei, the thrice per year kanji level test, which is a fun and useful mode of study.
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