世論 What Japan Thinks

With most phones now crammed full with the latest features, most manufacturers are putting more effort into the design aspect of their phones as the differentiating feature. To see how consumers perceive the look of their mobiles, MyVoice conducted a survey into mobile phone design.

Demographics

Over the first five days of September 2008 15,502 members of the MyVoice internet community completed a private online questionnaire. 54% of the sample were female, 1% in their teens,l 15% in their twenties, 36% in their thirties, 29% in their forties, and 19% in their fifties.

The first phone that I felt was stunning in design terms was the Sharp Aquos with the rotating screen that could change from portrait for standard email use to landscape for One Seg television watching. That phone first came out on SoftBank, but it’s now offered by all three major carriers. To my overseas readers - have Sharp licenced that technology to any foreign manufacturers? I seem to remember hearing that Panasonic’s push-button opening for clamshells has been licenced overseas, but Panasonic seem to keep that feature to themselves as a differentiating factor for the domestic market.

In the graph, I kept Sony-Ericsson separate as some of their hardware is worldwide, some domestic only.
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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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Jan Kuczynski let me know about a survey he translated on the colour and ‘feel’ of handsets that people in Japan want. A rather interesting survey that I wish I’d found first. I can’t imagine what a plant-like feel phone would be though!

I also hope that it’s just mobiles that these three women in his logo are holding…