世論 What Japan Thinks

infoPLANT conducted a survey regarding mobile phone game usage in Japan amongst 8,984 users of the DoCoMo iMode sevice, by offering the survey through the iMode menuing system. The questionnaire was available for a week in mid-November, and of the 8,984 respondents, 63.5% were female.

infoPLANT’s survey methods obviously indicate that they will most likely result in an over-representation of the heavy user demographic, but regardless this still presents an interesting snapshot on how some people use their mobile phones. One could argue that since a previous survey showed the majority of people were on unlimited usage plans (although the methodology of that survey was probably flawed), these consumers could more easily budget for pay games, and download them without worrying about additional transmission costs over and above the basic fee. Also note that almost all mobile phones come with built-in games, not just Tetris clones and the like, but pretty good quality commercial-grade RPGs and pet simulators. As for my own phone, I have a nice golf game, but I beat that and quit, and the shoot-em-up is no fun. I once downloaded a trial version of a pay-for game, but it took a long, long time and the game play was rather lacking, so basically I haven’t played any games at all this year.
Read the rest of this entry »

infoPLANT carried out a survey to find the most popular comedian in Japan, either single performers or manzai double-acts. 8,302 people filled in their choice through the opinion poll offered in an iMode mobile phone menu option during one week at the start of October. 30.4% of the respondents were male, and 69.6% female.

The most often chosen solo performer was none other than the man of the moment here, Lazer Ramon HG! “Hard Gay Number One Fuuuu!”, as he might exclaim. HG’s a guy who inspires as much hate as he does love – I find him very funny, on the whole, mainly as he is far more spontaneous than the average comedian, whereas others hate what they see as the negative image of gay people that he portrays. Although he does dress up like the stereotypical leather man, the character behind it is rather a fun-loving sort of image, I feel. Of course there’s the other category of haters that find his pelvic thrusting at children (not as bad as it sounds, really) a bad influence, which I say I must agree with, and I would try not to let any kids of mine watch him.
Read the rest of this entry »

InfoPLANT conducted a self-selecting survey in the middle of October through the iMode menuing system, to which 9,290 people replied, with just a third of them male, to find out what people do in the train.

I have a two hour commute myself, with about 40 minutes each way actually spent in the train. My usual activities are mobile phone mailing and reading a book, with my current reading material being a kanji study text book. I don’t usually sleep during my normal commute, although at the weekends I often feel my eyelids rather heavy. I’m not surprised at the high use of mobile phone games, but most of the men, especially, seem to play just mah jongg or pachinko games.
Read the rest of this entry »

ITMedia reported that Push To Talk, the new service being geared up for launch right now by DoCoMo in their new 902i range, is still completely unknown to almost four in five mobile phone users. Push To Talk is a walkie-talkie-like service, just press the button and talk, sending your voice over the IP network, so it is VoIP rather than a traditional call. However, their pricing is currently set to a rather high 5 yen per push, or a more reasonable 1,000 yen per month for unlimited access. But, as we will see later, less than a quarter of mobile phone users spend more than three minutes per day talking, and only just over a tenth feel they don’t talk enough.

Infoplant just released a survey (not yet available on their web site – it seems to have been done for “Keitai Best” magazine) carried out at the end of October amongst just 400 internet users (200 of each sex) aged 15 and above who owned mobile phones. (Presumably they used their internet monitor group and chose a demographically accurate cross-section, so the figures can be trusted.)

First, regarding Push To Talk, not even 10% were familiar with the features of the service, and just under 80% had not even heard of the term. However, when the main features were explained, about 60% said they would like to use it, with the number of women wanting to use it being 9 percentage points higher.

Read the rest of this entry »

infoPLANT performed a survey regarding the purchase and ownership of hard disk-based portable audio players. Not too suprisingly, along with Apple, Sony came out rather well. I always find the huge positive image of Sony rather depressing, as outside the PSP and PS2, most of their stuff is pretty much average quality or worse (and I’ve heard the PSP and PS2s aren’t much better) and overpriced, yet everyone loves them. Not that this is purely a Japanese trait – even the tough crowd over in Slashdot give Sony an easy time on the whole, regardless of Sony’s embrace of DRM, closed systems, and the recent rootkit fiasco.

infoPLANT surveyed 8,615 people, 35.5% male, over one week at the start of October. The respondents to the survey were self-selecting, choosing to fill in a questionnaire presented within the iMode menu system.

Q1: Do you have a hard disk-based portable audio player? (Sample size=8,615)

Yes	15.4%
No	84.6%

For males, three in ten teenagers have them, decreasing to less than one in ten for those over fifty, but for females, over one in five of the over-fifties sample owned one, exceeding the teenagers in second place by 0.2%! The sample in their thirties had the lowest ownership figures, with only 11.5% owning one. The reason for this interesting data is not mentioned.
Read the rest of this entry »

InfoPlant performed a survey of mobile phone users, carried out through the main menus of internet-enabled phones from DoCoMo, au and Vodafone. 16,833 people replied during the survey, lasting one week in the start of September. 67.4% of respondents were female, and iMode users, Ezweb users and Vodafone Live! users were 57.4%, 20.9% and 21.7% respectively. This is another self-selecting survey with a prize draw as a carrot, so the answers should be taken in that light.

Q1: Tell me how often you access sites from your mobile phone

	All	Male	Female
About every day	73.8%	76.7%	72.5%
Four or five days a week	10.4%	9.4%	10.9%
Two or three days a week	10.9%	9.5%	11.6%
About one day a week	3.1%	3.1%	3.2%
Less than that	1.6%	1.3%	1.8%

Not surprisingly, the younger the user, the more frequently they accessed.

Q2: Are you on a flat-rate packet plan? (ie, unlimited internet access)

	All	Male	Female
My phone supports it, and I’m using it	58.0%	59.9%	57.1%
My phone supports it, but I’m not on it, but want to change to it	12.3%	11.5%	12.7%
My phone supports it, but I’m not on it, and won’t change to it	5.9%	6.2%	5.8%
My phone doesn’t support it, but want to change to one that does	20.8%	19.4%	21.6%
My phone doesn’t support it, and won’t change to one that does	2.9%	3.0%	2.9%

Breaking down the table in Q1 by usage of inlimited access plans, we get:

	Unlimited access users	Not unlimited access users
About every day	85.7%	57.5%
Four or five days a week	6.8%	15.5%
Two or three days a week	5.5%	18.4%
About one day a week	1.3%	5.7%
Less than once a week	0.7%	3.0%

Q3: For unlimited access user, compared with before you started the service, what has increased? (Sample size=9,764; Multiple answer)

	All	Male	Female
Site Access Frequency	87.4%	89.7%	86.2%
Time spent at a particular site	60.0%	62.2%	58.9%
Number of games downloaded	29.0%	32.7%	27.1%
Number of non-game applets downloaded	20.1%	25.0%	17.7%
Number of ring tones downloaded	45.6%	46.5%	45.1%
Number of pay sites registered with	12.5%	12.6%	12.4%
Number of mails sent and received	36.9%	37.2%	36.8%
Number of times done shopping from mobile	14.3%	9.8%	16.7%
No change in particular	4.0%	3.3%	4.3%

The age breakdown has a couple of interesting spikes – ring tone download for teenagers is almost 50% more the next age group, and mail usage is about 25% to 30% higher for them too.

Q3A: For not unlimited access user, compared with before you started the service, what do you think might increase? (Sample size=7,069; Multiple answer)

	All	Male	Female
Site Access Frequency	66.9%	63.6%	68.4%
Time spent at a particular site	35.6%	34.8%	36.0%
Number of games downloaded	29.7%	32.9%	28.2%
Number of non-game applets downloaded	17.6%	20.6%	16.3%
Number of ring tones downloaded	41.2%	36.8%	43.2%
Number of pay sites registered with	7.9%	7.5%	8.1%
Number of mails sent and received	26.0%	23.6%	27.1%
Number of times done shopping from mobile	9.8%	6.9%	11.2%
No change in particular	12.1%	15.2%	10.8%

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.