世論 What Japan Thinks

japan.internet.com reported on a survey by JR Tokai Express Research on mobile phones and memory cards. The results presented in the story were in fact extracted from fuller research in JR Tokai Express Research’s 26th regular survey on mobile phone upgrading requirements. 330 people completed their private internet questionnaire; 69.7% of the sample was male, 10.6% in their twenties, 37.6% in their thirties, 33.3% in their forties, 13.0% in their fifties, and 5.5% in their sixties.

With phone cameras now up to 2 megapixels or more, and music download and playback features becoming commonplace, users of both these features may require somewhere to offload the data. I don’t know about the latest music phones, but many of the previous models with memory card slots came with a 16Mb card included. This should be used as a baseline when looking at Q2. Also, the current market price for a 128MB mini-SD card (the most-used format) is about 2,500 yen.
Read the rest of this entry »

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?
Read the rest of this entry »

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.
Read the rest of this entry »

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.
Read the rest of this entry »

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.
Read the rest of this entry »

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.
Read the rest of this entry »

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!
Read the rest of this entry »

japan.internet.com, in conjunction with JR Tokai Express Research, looked at what people did regarding their mobile phone batteries. They interviewed 337 mobile phone users from their internet monitor group by means of a private internet survey. 79.5% of the sample was male, with 14.8% in their twenties, 35.0% in their thirties, 33.8% in their forties, 13.9% in their fifties, and 2.4% in their sixties.
Read the rest of this entry »

goo Research recently published the results of some detailed investigation into the use of portable music players. Over four days at the end of March they interviewd by means of a private internet questionnaire 2,183 members of their monitor group. The respondents were 48.2% male, with 19.1% in their teens, 17.5% in their twenties, 19.7% in their thirties, 21.2% in their forties, 16.6% in their fifties, 4.8% in their sixties, and 1.2% seventy years old or more.

Note that MP3 player refers to either memory based or hard-disk based players only like iPods or D-Snaps, not CD players that support MP3 file formats. I am not sure under what category phones with music playback support are recorded; perhaps they are “Other”?

I’ve recently been testing a Sony NW-A3000 but I couldn’t really recommend it to anyone. The 20 Gb hard disk is nice, of course, but the PC-based software is unwieldy to say the least, as is the player software. Pet hates include that random shuffle seems not as random as it should be, doing Pause then Play will result in a one-second or so skip, and recharging the player resets the player back to the first track. I’ve heard that the iPod balances out the volume, but the Sony doesn’t, so I have to keep fiddling with the sound levels. On the other hand, I did manage to find an almost complete archive of Just A Minute, but on the downside I perhaps scare the other train passengers as I try to stifle laughs during my commute.
Read the rest of this entry »

infoPLANT recently carried out a survey into how people used their DoCoMo mobile phone’s default screen display. Over a week at the start of April they interviewed 6,358 people, 65.8% of them female, by means of a self-selecting survey from the iMode main menu.

Note that on the newer models of phones, not just a static wallpaper may be used, but also animations or applets may be set to run on the default display. The Japanese word 待ち受け画面, machiuke gamen is used to describe the wallpaper feature that this survey is concerned with. It refers to the display that appears after the phone has been idle for a few seconds, or perhaps when the phone is woken from sleep mode but before going to menu mode.

My own phone usually has seasonal Pinky pictures with calendar overlay.
Read the rest of this entry »