世論 What Japan Thinks

A recent survey from goo Research, reported on by japan.internet.com, into mobile devices (the fourth time this regular survey was conducted) found that the iPhone far outsold ASUS’s Eee PC, the top netbook.

Demographics

On the 9th of February 2010 1,080 members of the goo Research monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 53.1% of the sample were male, 17.0% in their teens, 18.7% in their twenties, 21.2% in their thirties, 16.5% in their forties, and 26.6% aged fifty or older.

It is useful to compare the outcome of this survey and the other survey I published yesterday on mini notebook computers.
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I’ve defintely noticed since the iPhone 3GS was released in Japan the number of handsets I’m seeing has definitely increased, but what are people doing with them? This recent survey from Point On Research, as reported on by japan.internet.com, looked at this in a survey entitled iPhone apps.

Demographics

On the 27th of October 2009 800 mobile phone users completed a mobile phone based survey. The sample was exactly 50:50 male and female, 25.0% in their teens, 25.0% in their twenties, 25.0% in their thirties, and 25.0% in their forties. Note that the below is just the highlights of the survey; the full set of results will be available at a price.

I’m in the US right now, and the iPhone is quite stunningly popular! I suspect the visibility of the device is affected by people fiddling with their iPhone more than people fiddle with other more boring devices, or people are more addicted, or are just showing off. In addition, a French guy took me along to Fry’s yesterday and he picked up an iPod Touch for about 100 euro less than he’d have to pay at home.
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After one year of the iPhone in Japan, how is it viewed? This was the question posed by iShare when they conducted a survey into the iPhone.

Demographics

Between the 7th and 10th of July 2009 568 members of the CLUB BBQ free email forwarding service completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 53.7% of the sample were male, 35.6% in their twenties, 29.2% in their thirties, and 35.2% in their forties.

I’ve not actually touched an iPhone, although I do feel it would be nice from certain points of view, but I’m not really that big an Apple fan, and as most of my email is emoticon, emoji and decomail-ridden I don’t think that the iPhone is the best fit for me.

However, I am looking forward to Japanese manufacturers bringing out their own Android-based mobiles but… ah, I’ll stop there.
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With the release of the Apple iPhone 3GS on the 26th of June 2009, goo Research immediately conducted a survey into the iPhone, the results of which have been reported on japan.internet.com.

Demographics

Between the 26th and 29th of June 2009 1,036 members of the goo Research monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.9% of the sample were male, 16.5% in their teens, 18.1% in their twenties, 21.3% in their thirties, 16.3% in their forties, 15.7% in their fifties, and 12.0% aged sixty or older.

There was an interesting story recently on Asiajin (and other places) about how the iPhone 3GS popped up into first place in the sales rankings on release. Although there was discussion about the validity of the ranking, what was missed out was the Blackberry Bold being in 6th place, an extremely dubious positioning in my view. Looking further at the list of companies they survey for the sales figures, they do not survey the official carrier’s own shops, which in my view makes the data extremely inaccurate.

Looking at the charms of the iPhone, the big, big surprise for me is that the browser comes so low! If I were to get one, that would be the one function I would be purchasing it for.
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I’m still looking for a survey on the hottest topic these days, the disease formally known as swine ‘flu, but with no luck yet, so instead you’ll have to make do with a look at an update on last year’s pandemic of mass hysteria in this survey from iShare on the Apple iPhone’s image in Japan.

Demographics

Between the 13th and 16th of April 2009 342 members of the CLUB BBQ free email forwarding service who had a mobile phone for personal use completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 55.3% of the sample were male, 36.8% in their twenties, 29.2% in their thirties, and 33.9% in their forties.

In Q2 it is interesting that nearly all of the series mentioned are RPGs, but given the lack of an external keypad, I’m not really too sure how well they would play. As I suspected, if you have a jailbroken phone, the MAME emulator can be downloaded to give access to the older titles, and the touchpanel controls look nice.
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emoji, literaly “picture characters”, are the small graphical icons that fill (or litter, depending on your point of view!) many Japanese mobile phone email messages, but within Japan the three main mobile phone service providers have all got different encoding representations for them and support different sets of emoji, meaning that although they all perform encoding translation when exchanging emails, it can be a bit hit-or-miss as to whether or not the message gets through. Next, add into the mix the iPhone with support for at least four different kinds of mail (SMS, SoftBank’s own iPhone-specific mailbox, webmail, and third-party POP3-based mailboxes), and even within the one device a lot of trickery needs to take place to make the experience consistent for the user.

Google have recently been ramping up their advertising of Gmail in Japan as they currently languish with the also-rans in the popularity stakes. One aspect of their advertising has been to highlight their support of emoji, but the lack of a standard encoding method makes everything a bit more complicated than it need be.

Thus, engineers from Google and Apple have got together to try to propose an encoding for these emoji (they have identified 674 of them!) that can be added to the official standard ISO/IEC 10646, as can be seen in this document, Proposal for Encoding Emoji Symbols. The proposal uses a few of my translations as reference documents, which is nice.

This survey has perhaps a rather narrow sample, but it is the early 20s women who are the trend leaders (or the first to adapt trends promoted by industry, depending on how cynical you want to be) so this recent survey sponsored by JIDPO (Japan Industrial Design Promotion Organization) and conducted by goo Research into design reveals a number of interesting numbers.

Demographics

Between the 1st and 5th of December 2008 1,102 women from the goo Research monitor group aged between 20 and 26 answered an online private questionnaire. 33.2% of the sample resided in the Tokyo area, 33.6% in the Osaka area, and 33.2% in the Nagoya area. 9.9% of the sample were aged 20, 14.0% aged 21, 17.2% aged 22, 16.4% aged 23, 20.1% aged 24, 21.8% aged 25, and 0.6% aged 26.

Not surprisingly Apple feature prominently, but note that in Q1 there are six or less iPhone owners who rate their device (cross reference the data with Q3), versus 125 iPod owners, yet in Q2 the iPhone is the second-most appreciated device that people do not own. Both the SoftBank CEO and I know the reason for that.

I am surprised, however, by Sharp’s mobiles being high on the list. Their AQUOS mobile phone ball joint is an impressive piece of industrial design, but the overall phone is a bit ordinary, I feel. My personal favourite mobile phone from a design point of view is the NEC N703iD credit-card themed one.

Oh, and my wife has modelled wedding dresses for the Yumi Katsura in Q8.
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The people over at Strapya have come up with the latest innovation in Japanese space age technology to allow you to attach a cute (or otherwise) strap to your iPhone or other holeless mobiles with what they claim is their “long time dreaming item for everyone who loves cell phone straps”.

OK, it’s just a stick-on button, but at 210 yen (US$2.16 or so) for not one but two holes, you cannot go wrong.

Since I’m selling you stuff, I’d like to mention the following cases:

They seem very popular in Japan amongst the iPhone users I see.

When I wrote my iPhone R.I.P. article last month a lot of people told me I was completely wrong for making such a big deal out of emoji as the key feature missing on Apple’s iPhone in Japan.

However, at a recent press conference, Masayoshi Son, the CEO of SoftBank, the Japanese carrier for the iPhone, said the following about the planned update of the iPhone software and the addition of emoji:

“Email without emoticons can’t be email in Japan. We persuaded Apple Computer (to localize iPhones for the Japanese market).”

Since I’m tooting my own blog’s horn here, I’d also like to point out that Apple still need to add a retro CHTML (iMode-like) browser and a strap hook.

A recent survey reported on by ITmedia and conducted by ASCII Media Works looked at Mac users, in particular contrasting them with Windows users.

Demographics

In mid-September 2008 278 Mac users and 494 Windows PC users who were memebers of the ASCII General Research monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. The age and sex profiles were not noted, although given the small amount of housewives and given that ASCII is a computer magazine, the respondent pool appears to be mostly male.

There’s so many great figures in this survey - Mac users earn more, are more creative and are more interested in foreign goods, whereas Windows users are more conservative and like the same old same. The most stunning figure, however, was for liked mobile phone manufacturers in Q7; not surprisingly over two in five Mac users were iPhone fans, but a surprisingly-low 5% of Windows users expressed an interest. Following up, Q8 showed that over half as many again Mac users were with SoftBank; remember, SoftBank carry the iPhone, and with similar percentages for other carriers, one must conclude that around one in ten Mac owners have bought iPhones to accompany their phones from other carriers.
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