世論 What Japan Thinks

DIMSDRIVE Research recently published the results of their 84th Rankings survey. This time one of the questions was on what mobile phone features are really not needed at all. They questioned 5,950 people from their monitor group at the end of June by means of a closed internet questionnaire.

With most newer phones being loaded with more and more features, with a corresponding increase in development costs (you’d scarcely believe me if I told you how much one of the recent DoCoMo 90x series cost in person-months!), this is perhaps a timely survey that may give the phone companies pause for thought.

Note that SMS features on the list – almost every phone has a far more advanced mail client, so the SMS is just there for legacy support. Another strange answer is the wireless LAN; as far as I am aware, it is not a feature that is widely available apart from one or two specialised SmartPhones. Perhaps people were just lumping BlueTooth and infra-red support together under this category?

This poll also raises more questions than it answers. Why is BlueTooth right up there? Does it indicate consumer ignorance of what it does? Why do more men want rid of games rather than music playback?
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japan.internet.com published the results of a survey by JR Tokai Express Research into mobile information devices. On the last day of June and the first of July they interviewed by means of a private internet survey amongst their monitor group 330 people, 64.8% male. 10.0% were in their twenties, 30.6% in their thirties, 33.6% in their forties, 19.1% in their fifties, and 6.7% in their sixties. Note that this survey was looking at personal, not business, requirements.

I was suprisised that more people said that their ideal mobile environment would contain a spreadsheet editor rather than a scheduler, but perhaps this reflects the fact that many people already have sufficient mobile scheduling capability, be it either a pen and paper diary or a mobile phone’s function; most phones nowadays come with a rather functional scheduling application.
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japan.internet.com recently published the results of a survey by Cross Marketing Inc into the use of mobile phone alarms. Over two days at the end of June they interviewed 300 members of their monitor panel by means of a private internte-based questionnaire. As is usual for Cross Marketing with their small sample sizes, both the sex and ages of the sample were blanced. 50:50 male and female, and 20% in each age band from teens to fifties.

You may recall a previous survey I translated where the alarm feature was found to be the most-used function excluding the basics of voice and mail. I can’t say I use mine very much – only when I have something to do the same day and can’t be bothered making a full schedule entry. I don’t know for sure whether or not there is a snooze feature on my phone, but I suspect there is a key somewhere to press. Usually during the week I have a proper alarm clock, although more often than not I awake before it, but the weekends my wife sets mobile alarms for the both of us.
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NEPRO Japan recently conducted a survey to find out what people thought regarding the introduction of mobile phone number portability. Over one day at the start of June they presented a public survey through the menu systems of the three main mobile phone providers; DoCoMo’s iMode, Vodafone’s (Softbank’s) Vodafone live!, and au’s EZweb. They received 3,982 valid responses, with 60% of them being from women, 3% in their teens, 38% in their twenties, 41% in their thirties, and 18% aged 40 or older. Note that sample sizes for each of the questions is not clear from the text.

Number portability is basically the ability to keep the same number when switching mobile phone providers; however,it doesn’t address email address portability, which if anything is more important than keeping the same phone number. Perhaps the service providers will forward mail on payment of a small fee, as there are certain differences between the services; the one I am most familiar with is that DoCoMo mail saves photos to a web site and mails just the URL whereas au does photos as attachments. (or so I believe anyway)

Also note that even though numbers may be portable, the handset will almost certainly not be.
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japan.internet.com, in conjunction with JR Tokai Express Research, looked at the issue of mobile phones for children. At the start of June they interviewed 330 people, 92.4% male, between the ages of 30 and 50, employed by public or private enterprises, and having children. You will know from my previous reports on surveys that women are not well-represented in the workforce, especially after childbirth.

au in particular are heavily promoting their children’s mobile phone on television right now; the parent (mother, of course) gets a live update overlaid on a map of where the child, or to be more precise, the child’s mobile is. I personally believe that most of these GPS tracking features are playing on unnecessary fear. I’d love to see a survey asking purchasers of these phones if they also (a) belt up their kids in the car, (b) get them to wear a helmet on the bike, and don’t ride two (or even three) up on mother’s bike, and (c) don’t leave under-10s home alone, all of which are much more injury- or death-prone than stranger-danger.
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Having recently looked at what people do when their computer has a problem, now NEPROJAPAN co, ltd recently carried out a survey to find out about users’ experiences regarding problems with their mobile phones either breaking or getting lost. One day in mid-May of this year they posted an open self-selecting questionnaire to the three leading mobile phone companies’ (iMode, Vodafone live! and EZweb) menu systems and got 3,695 valid replies. The sample was 60% female, 3% in their teens, 37% in their twenties, 43% in their thirties, and 17% aged forty or older.

My phone currently has a half-dead sub-screen, but apart from that, I once lost an earlier phone in a taxi somewhere. Luckily I actually had a backup of my address book as I’d just bought some connection software and had been playing around with it. Since then, however, I must admit to being remiss about backups, although pictures do get semi-regularly offloaded and imported into my PC whenever the internal memory fills up.
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japan.internet.com, in conjunction with Cross Marketing Inc, looked at what people thought about mobile phone cameras. They interviewed 150 male and 150 female mobile phone owners from up and down the country; 20.0% were aged 18 or 19, and similarly 20.0% in each of the twenties, thrities, forties, and fifties age bands.

My current camera has a mere 60,000 pixels, so all it produces are pretty muddy images that look awful even on the tiny screen! However, the QR Code reader is an excellent feature that’s well-supported by many print magazines, but as I understand it they are still to make headway in the rest of the world.
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japan.internet.com, in conjunction with Cross Marketing Inc, looked at how picky people were about their mobile phones. They interviewed by means of a private internet questionnaire 300 people equally split between male and female. Similarly, 16.6% were in their teens (18 or 19 years old only), and the same 16.6% in their twenties, thirties, forties, fifties and sixties.

Exactly what consistutes pickiness is not defined within the survey. Whether it is manufacturer, colour, price, feature set, or any other element that makes people hum and haw over their selection, we do not know. Perhaps the fuller results of this survey may clear up this matter, but we shall never know!
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infoPLANT recently released the results of a survey they conducted into game machines. They conducted their research by means of a public questionnaire available through the iMode menu system for a week at the end of April. 5,924 people completed the survey, with 62.5% female.

Note the figures suggesting that the Nintendo DS is significantly more popular with the older generation. Surely this must be related to the current boom in brain training in Japan, in particular the massively popular series for the DS, a set of titles I dearly want to buy, along with the DS itself (and also a kanji dictionary), if I ever manage to earn any money from this blog!
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In a survey performed by infoPLANT on games machine ownership (warning: Japanese PDF), and translated in detail here, the most stunning result of the questionnaire is that the sales of the Nintendo DS seems to be driven by the older generation, as can be seen from the chart on the right.

The most likely explanation for this trend, I believe, is the brain training boom in Japan, in particular the Brain Age game and other similar titles that promise to ward off senility and keep one’s mind active, even though the celebrity advertising it on the television is merely a pretty young thing.

On a slight side note, my voice was one of the voices used to tune the recognition engine for British English for the European launch of the Brain Age titles.