世論 What Japan Thinks

According to this survey published by infoPlant, QR codes are very well-known and widely used. One word of caution, however, is that this survey, carried out at the end of August, had the respondents self-selected from a link in the DoCoMo iMode menu system. 7,660 people completed the survey, 5,023 of them women, so naturally one would expect a strong bias in favour of the question.

Note that the QR Code at the head of the story was made for free at the web site here.

Q: Do you know about QR codes (2D barcodes)? (Sample size=7,660)

I’ve used them	73.3%
I know about them, and have a reader feature in my phone, but I haven’t used them	7.6%
I know about them, but don’t have a reader feature in my phone, so I haven’t used them	15.6%
I don’t know about them	3.5%

Looking at the age breakdown, for both males and females almost 90% of the under 20′s use them, but the rate steadily drops down to end up at just about half of all the over 50s.

Q: For those who answered that they used them, in what printed materials have you used QR Codes? (Sample size=5,513)

Business card	5.7%
Newspaper	31.9%
Magazine	84.2%
Advertising flyer	51.1%
Poster	14.2%
Direct mail	25.0%
Mail-order catalog	24.8%
PC web site	20.7%
Other	13.1%

There was no significant differences between the sexes, except for almost two and a half times more women used mail-order catalog QR Codes.

Q: Which of the following QR Code-based services do you want to use? (Sample size=7,660)

Easy phone book registration from a business card, etc	36.8%
Read a URL and access a site	74.3%
Replacement for company identification badge	29.0%
Cashless shopping at vending machines, etc	28.3%
Buying goods written about in magazines	27.7%
Replacement for tickets (concerts, travel passes, etc)	32.5%
Others	5.5%
Don’t want to use	7.4%

Strangely enough, I thought, those who answered in the first question that they didn’t know what QR Codes were didn’t want to use any services at all, on the whole. Almost two-thirds of that group answered “Don’t want to use” to the above question.

Personally, I’ve always thought it was a daft idea, and never knew why companies are pushing it so hard over here in Japan. The last thing you want from a mobile is for the battery to run out, and trying to follow the action on a tiny screen with a non-existant aerial seems like a lesson in frustration. This survey seems to back up my opinions. It was carried out at the end of July, amongst 2,156 people from a private internet survey group, 55.1% male, predominantly under 50 years old.
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The last two articles have been praising Sony just a bit too much, so here’s a survey, well sales figures anyway, for mobile phones in Japan

For the second quarter of this year, the sales by manufacturers of mobile phones for all networks in Japan was as follows:

Panasonic	18.3%
Sharp	16.6%
NEC	14.4%
Toshiba	12.7%
Others	38.0%

The total sales for the quarter was 10,650,000 handsets, down 3.2% from the same quarter last year. 3G handsets made up 74.9% of the total, with the 3G share predicted to be around 90% by the last quarter of the year.<

Sony don’t seem able to make a good mobile. They have their own scroll wheel-like interfaace, but it doesn’t seem to be that popular, and their current flagship, the Premini-II, is absolutely tiny (and the original even tinier), but since the majority of users are heavy emailers, the virtually unusable keyboard and the screen that requires squinting doesn’t sell very well.