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iPhone 3GS Is Number One In Japan
mudimba writes "The iPhone 3GS 32GB is currently the best selling phone in Japan (the 16GB version came in at number nine). This is in stark contrast to reports from earlier this year that the Japanese hate the iPhone. Nobody is sure what specific features caused the change of heart, though it is speculated that video capture and voice control might be part of the answer. When the 3G iPhone first came out it saw a spike in sales, but unlike the 3GS it was unable to outsell locally-made handsets."
This is in stark contrast to reports from earlier this year that the Japanese hate the iPhone.
This "hatred" was debunked shortly thereafter:
AppleInsider has posted a great article explaining that Wired's story about Japanese iPhone hate was completely false and has been edited at least twice. The comments in the article were recycled and taken out of context, with those interviewed blogging about the mistakes. The piece then goes on to analyze the iPhone's standing in Japan, as well as some of the major factors working for and against it. At last it points out that the Wall Street Journal tried the same myth of failure just after the phone's launch in Japan, recycled from a myth the year before, pushed by a research company with a possible anti-Apple agenda.
My work here is dung.
Firstly, the Japanese, like much of the civilised world, have a distrust of the Linux operating system. The iPhone however runs using a variant of BSD, Linux's big, more professional daddy, and hence is trusted and enjoyed by those who value honour and pride, such as the Japanese.
Secondly, it is well known that phones running Linux-based OS's still require the user to drop down to a termnial screen to modify text configuration files to change things like their phone background or ringtone. This is unacceptable.
Thirdly, Linux requires the user to have a beard and/or a weight problem. People such as this are shunned by Japanese society, and rightly so. The natural consequence of this is that users of Linux phones are also shunned.
Together these reasons make it clear why the iPhone is acheiving such a success in those faraway eastern lands. They are so far away, aren't they?
it's small and expensive. That beats "feature-rich" any day of the week.
It certainly is feature rich. What features are missing?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
TV, radio, swipe payment ability, quality camera: just a few of the common features in Japanese phones.
The iPhone is turning into one of the foremost portable gaming platforms. Even the nice Nokia phones can't claim that. They've put Civilization on it now, FPSs, RTSs. The screen size:total size ratio is probably the highest yet of a gaming device. What's not to like?
I'm not saying this accounts for all the sales, but this is Japan we're talking about.
The Japanese aren't brand-motivated
Japan is the leading market for luxury brands, like Gucci, Louis Vitton, Hermes etc. Brand motivation and recognition are sky high.
Maybe because those brands produce quality products?
Basically every Japanese cell phone supports "emoji" emoticons, but iPhone was long without the support. This definitely was a deal breaker for some people, especially younger consumers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji
It's officially only available for Japanese customers, but it can be unlocked: http://www.iphonesavior.com/2009/02/spell-number-app-unleashes-free-iphone-emoji.html
The instructions sound suspicious but I personally tested this on 2.2 firmware and it worked. I can now use emoji in text messages, tweets, or any other text field. It's also a great way to amaze your friends who have iPhones; every iPhone from 2.2 up supports viewing emoji by default.
The Sticky Issue - My TF2 Blog
(about luxury products)Maybe because those brands produce quality products?
So do others. In this segment, quality is just a part of the overall package you are buying. If you compare a Timex and a Patek Philippe, they probably show the time equally well.
Although Japan is an important market in it's own right, success in Japan is more important for the ripples in creates in the rest of Asia. Trends in Japan remain an important influencer in the region, with Asians generally paying far more attention to Japanese fashion, pop stars, gadgets and movies than American equivalents. Apple has negotiated an initial sale of 5 million iPhones to Unicom in China, the news that it is now the No. 1 phone in Japan (and ripple affects such as more Japanese pop stars and actors using them) will make that first 5 million sell even faster. With North America, Europe and, now, key parts of Asia on board, the rest of the world will follow. What we are looking at here is the emergence of a global computing standard that will be with us for decades.
The iPhone 3GS, the current phone from Apple, lacks TV, Swipe payment, cannot act as a visa/mastercard/AE etc, a decent camera, HD video recording or HD video playing, Television (analogue or digital) reception, radio (analogue, digital or satellite), VPN, WiFi sharing, trackpad emulation, a full keyboard, facial recognition and full voice control - all of which have been in all japanese phones since at least 2007.
Yeah, but with my Patek Philippe, I get the privilege of paying $1500 or so every time I have it serviced. You can't get that kind of quality in a Timex.
The Japanese dig the compass.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
The Japanese aren't brand-motivated. They are quality-motivated. That's why Japanese cars are boring but last forever.
That's wrong. If you had spoken to a British or American consumer at the time of Japanese automotive boom, you would have found that they are just as quality motivated as the American consumer. And had you spoken to American or British or Italian automotive makers, you would have found some of them wanted quality but were just slightly misinformed as to how they should attain it.
As someone who's taken a course on this, we got the Japanese invention known as The House of Quality pounded into our heads. It's basically a far superior way to "define relationship between customer desires and the firm/product capabilities." The Japanese invented this, I don't know the exact origins (wish I did) but instead of it ended up as some weird business process patent it ended up being used by everyone over there. As a result, their cars didn't leak oil (like the British motorcycles) and they didn't slowly reject every screw that was holding them together. I'm sure the Japanese had many more tools at analyzing the engineering aspects of cars but the fact of the matter is that their engineering and quality control practices just exceeded anything anyone else had (if anyone else had quality control at the time).
Americans look for cool things, which is why American cars are flashy and muscular but also break down constantly and have terribly assembled trim.
This seriously got moderated up? Have you ever been to Tokyo? Have you seen how flashy that city is? Have you ever seen Japanimation, Japanese commercials or game shows? Flashy is all I can think of to describe that.
Your cultural stereotypes humor me. But I think you're suffering from some serious misinformation and anecdotes to which I could provide counter-anecdotes all day long. But both stances are merely an exercise in futility.
They knew, unlike the dopes who lick Steve Jobs' nutsack here in the US, that it was crap the moment they laid hands on it.
Well, if they laid hands on it, they've already purchased it and that's a win for Apple. Or are you saying that the (virtually) same reviews each culture read influenced them differently? The Japanese have more options than we do and they had things that were better than the original iPhones. Those weren't really marketed in America. The iPhone wasn't crap compared to what 90% of Americans were already using. That's the important point, not that American consumers are any stupider or smarter than Japanese consumers.
My work here is dung.
Indeed, although it's just as much a pro-Apple agenda that spread the news: if people don't like a product, it's much better if you can dismiss it as an irrational hatred, rather than considering the possibility that they might *gasp* actually prefer other phones.
For this news, I'd be curious to see market share. Since Apple only have one phone, and Nokia etc have loads of different products, looking at single phone sales whilst useful in some contexts, is not useful for judging who's number one (it's the multiple choice fallacy where votes get split between similar products).
There's also the obvious point that the phone has only just been released - it's misleading to claim "Number One", since this is a figure based on one month's sales, not quarterly or yearly, let alone total phones in existence.
And since the Iphone is the only phone that gets covered on Tech sites like Slashdot (god knows why), it's not surprising that they'll do fairly well. I fear we'll have a self-fulfilling prophecy where we end up with it being the most popular phone, precisely because of the coverage solely on this one phone. And then we'll end up with a monopoly platform on mobile platform that's more locked down and controlled by a single company. Nice one, Slashdot!
For all we know, those other phones may have been number one (indeed, one of them must have been), but we wouldn't have heard about it on Slashdot.
Consider - what was the Number One phone, last month in Japan, and why wasn't there a story about it? Or the Number One phone in the US, come to that? It's only news if it's unusual.
Of course I'll probably be modded down now for providing possible explanations that don't fit in with the pro-Apple viewpoint here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_Field_Communication
4u
There are no tentacle porn apps, so I really don't get the interest.
Are you kidding? If you jailbreak it you can have all of the transgendered multiendowed lolirape tentacle furry apps you can imagine... and some you can't imagine.
It's still missing an infrared port for transmitting phone numbers and such too, isn't it?
iPods sold badly.
Uh, you might have a case with the original iPhone but you certainly do not have a case with iPods. They surpassed Sony's MP3 player in 2005 and there's no shortage of information saying they're very popular in Japan.
Get over it. Jeez, it's like a religion with you guys.
You have to own all models of the iPhone in order to be eligible to be completely clear so that your OT (operating telephone) levels are uninhibited. Are you a suppressive person? Oh no, I've been in contact with you! Great Woz! Now Jobs won't let me get to the last OT level no matter how much I spend on his products!
My work here is dung.
The FELICA system. Used to pay for train fairs, coffee, vending machines, etc.
If you haven't seen most Japanese Phones, they tend to be larger on average than American cell phones. The iPhone is about the same size as most phones here in Japan. It is a little wider but thinner than most phones but it is very normal in terms of bulk(volume).
In fact one of my Japanese friends just brought home a 32gb iPhone two days ago. So I asked him why he bought the 32gb version vs the 16gb. For him at least it came down to comparing features of the iPhone vs other Japanese cell phones. He felt that the extra space allowed the iPhone to be a computer replacement. Why having having 32gb vs 16gb suddenly makes it into small computer vs a big cell phone, I don't know. He also said that softbank(a cell phone company here in Japan) is pricing the iPhone very competitively.
He feels he bought a small computer that can make calls and not really a cell phone. Maybe that is why... 16gb of storage for a computer would be nothing... but 32gb would be far better at least if you think of the iPhone as a small computer and not as a cell phone. That might be why the 32gb version is selling far more than the 16gb version.
Thanks for the info - I had no idea that phones could do some of these things.
See, these are the sorts of things it would be good to hear about on tech sites. Instead, I'll probably hear about them in five years' time when it gets added to the Iphone...
The 32GG 3GS may be number 1, but the article doesn't mention what sort of market share it takes to claim that spot. I was just in Japan for most of this summer, and I went looking at phones with some Japanese friends. There are just SO many feature-rich phone choices out there from all of the major carriers that no single model really seemed to stand out as a market leader. If the 32GB 3GS got even a small bump in sales, that could have pushed it into first place.
As for the swipe payment option, I expected to see things like Mobile Suica used by lots of people, but it really doesn't seem to be too common yet. Most people still seemed to pay for train and subway trips with regular Suica (or Pasmo, Icoca, etc.) cards in their wallets. It's certainly a cool feature, but it apparently hadn't been adopted by a large part of the population yet.
Since Apple only have one phone, and Nokia etc have loads of different products...
You didn't read the summary. It plainly states that the 16GB iphone is number 9. That would indicate 2 things
http://p8ste.com - Web based Clipboard
I don't have any evidence, but if I had to guess I'd say that it's the app store that made the difference. The app store is truly transformative, in many non-obvious ways.
It brings network effects to the phone. For a while it seemed everyone I knew had a RAZR, but the popularity of the phone added no value to the individual user. With the iPhone, however, the popularity of the phone brings increased developer attention, which the app store translates to improved functionality, creating a positive feedback loop. Friends will also recommend apps to each other, further creating a network effect, and reminding the non-iphone-owning friends what they're missing.
The app store brings the best form of lock-in Windows ever had - But will it run my apps? - to the phone. Suddenly no non-iPhone can be a true upgrade, since you will likely lose some of your app functionality. Common things, like interfaces for major social sites, etc., will likely be standard, but everyone will have a different set of apps they consider crucial, which will make upgrading difficult. The breadth of the app store has brought the long tail to the phone. It also allows people to be very picky. I spent a several weeks testing out various todo lists on the iPhone, and I won't be happy to change phones unless it has a todo list that meets the very specific criteria I developed.
Certainly other phones will soon have access to app stores of their own, but the huge lead that Apple now has will make it very hard for someone else to catch up. They'll tout how they don't have the same approval headaches that the iPhone does, and that openness will be great. But we don't have to look far for lessons on how the popular operating system can be vastly inferior, yet still more successful than competitors.
The iPhone app store sets the iPhone up to succeed for all the reasons that Windows has. I think it's going to take a significant technology leap or other serious market disruption to stop them at this point. Regardless of how you feel about Apple, you have to respect the the way they've played this.
The market doesn't work like that. People flock to the features that they want most, not the features that you deem are the most useful. For example, everyone in Japan is already using swipe payment, in spite of the fact that you think it is "retarded". This is a selling point for almost every smart phone but the iPhone.
I live in Japan (and own an iphone but that's moot for this discussion). Softbank has done a few things lately that probably had quite a bit to do with this. They have been for months running a hugely successful ad campaign with a little white Dog as the mascot, I don't pay enough attention to tell his name or the details but I guarantee you my wife and mother-in-law could (and just about any trend oriented female or male on the street could). They also recently signed SMAP and began running commercials featuring them a week or so ago. If you aren't aware of just how unbelievably huge SMAP is here I most likely can't explain it, explaining a "boy band" who are now in their 30s would probably be hard enough haha. I had never seen anything like it personally coming from the US, they are very very popular here amongst nearly all types of people and it shows Softbank is the king of advertising in the phone market over here.
Secondly, they recently dropped the price way down on the iphones both on the ownership fees and the monthly packet plans. I'm not fully aware of the details as I got my iphone before the drop (dammit!) but if you go past a Softbank store FREE IPHONE is plastered all over the place. The free ones are the old model but the 3Gs is fairly cheap too. Softbank is known to do some fairly shady fee structures so some customers are wary of them, but hey you can't beat free as a marketing tool to get customers into the store. Also iphone was known as a luxury here and some people probably see this price drop as a chance to get one finally.
Oh and they also finally came out with a one-seg video adapter for the iphone which many Japanese want. (Digital Broadcast TV on your phone.)
So yeah, in summary, new gadget (always works in Japan) + super hot marketing campaigns + cheap prices + finally getting the iphone to keep up with the Joneses tech wise, win win for Softbank and I'm not really surprised as a casual observer of the "keitai" market that iphone 3Gs is #1 here (this month).
The company does not survey the carrier's own shops, which are major players in the Japanese cellphone market. In addition, number three, the Panasonic 830P is an almost one year old phone (last year's winter model) since superceded by two newer Panasonic phones, and the Casio W63CA is similarly an ancient (in Japanese terms) model.
Thus, to anyone who knows about the Japanese mobile phone market (such as anyone who reads my blog) the survey results are obviously biased towards bulk retailers and the people who frequent them rather than to the average Taro who frequents the carrier's own store on the High Street.
The quality lenses required for high quality photography are MUCH too large for a camera.
Which is why I use the Hubble space telescope for my photography needs.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Also, it needs to be noted that the iPhone is only offered by SoftBank, which is the 3rd smallest carrier in Japan. The iPhone's sales are still dwarfed by phones offered by the 2 largest, NTT Docomo and KDDI's au.
Also, here in Japan, softbank coverage is absolutely the worst ever. No building penetration, dead spots inside of major cities, etc...
If it wasn't locked to SoftBank, I might pick one up myself, but the phone is to make calls, and if I can't do that, then the phone, by association, sucks.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
So, as an ignorant American I am baffled by the rest of the list. The Sharp SH-06A is the no. 2 phone? It seems to be a fairly boring clamshell phone with a nice camera. Am I missing something?
You are indeed missing something. The Japanese cell phone market is completely different from the European or US market. The whole things is well explained in this New York Times article
Basically it's a software vs hardware thing, and it boils down to this: Unlike the rest of the world market, which is software oriented right now (and this one of the reason apple is doing so well), the Japanese cell phone market is actually much more technologically oriented.
All it takes for a phone to be "cool" in the west now is a big touchscreen and facebook/twitter apps (and let's face it, it also probably needs to be an apple product). But seriously, what sells phone is software: email, IM, internet apps, etc. What sells in Japan is hardware features, because internet-enabled cell phones aren't a novelty there anymore, internet at 3G speeds is old news (2001), it's just part of what a phone is supposed to do, not the selling point anymore.
Then the form factor, this is a completely subjective thing, you only find the Sharp SH-06A boring because it's a clamshell phone... and this is exactly why it is cool in Japan. The candybar (a la iphone) phones are seen as business-like/boring there. The vast majority of japanese phones are clamshells but that form factor is basically dead in the west, it had its time, but it's gone out of fashion.
The Sharp SH-06A is a great phone, I'd buy in a heartbeat if I could. Why?
- 848×480 resolution: There are very few non-japanese phone with those kind of resolutions. Yet this is a major feature as far as browsing goes, plus videos can be watched in their full native resolution glory. Resolution is one of those area where the iphone dominant position is actually holding the market back (by setting low norm/expectations).
- High quality Sharp AQUOS screen (also a touchscreen by the way)
- 10MP camera
- High-res video recording
- It looks a lot cooler than any iphone/blackberry/palm!
I don't know if its just me but you seem to be implying that the iPhone has become popular because of articles about it. I think there are articles about it because it is a good phone that is popular. People like to read about things they like and buy and thus its easy to get high readership on an article about a something that people love. I want an iPhone but not because of articles. I want it because in my opinion it's the best 'phone'(palm top) out there. It may not have the most features and blackberry's may have more and better features but blackberrys lack the usability that the iPhone delivers.
You talk about a fallacy in your second sentence so you should know it is a fallacy to assume that the articles are creating the popularity and not the other way around. You don't know which caused which and you are just assuming the one that fits your position. Could it be that this article was written because of the previous article claiming Japan hated the iPhone (omfg negative press about the iPhone, that can't happen under your assumptions)? If the previous hate article didn't exist then this article wouldn't exist. Find a article about Japan hating Nokia then you can ask why there wasn't an article about Nokia. You are comparing Apples to oranges.
I have the iPod Touch and I think it may be one of the greatest devices I have used, when I have wifi, and it is still lacking many of the iPhones features.
So while you may be right about the iPhone sales in Japan, I think you are wrong about this so called Apple conspiracy. It's not everyone's fault that Apple makes some great products. It's not just marketing that gets people to buy millions of units of something as expensive as an iPhone.
Have you even tried using other phones and comparing them to the iPhone? All the 'iPhone killers' I have used are unbearably clunky and lack everything that makes the iPhone popular while only technically including the same features.
Actually, take a walk through the Tokyo train station some time. about 90% of the people there are swiping their phone over the turnstiles to pay for their ticket. Also, you can walk up to a vending machine and touch your phone to it and your item is paid for. The TV and radio feature in japanese phones is due to the train rides that everybody deals with. You'll see probablly 90% of the people on trains (that aren't sleeping anyways) are listening to something via headphones attached to their cell phone.
Here in Japan, your cellphone is your laptop, music player, tv, radio, business card swapper, credit card, train ticket, spare change, book reader, book writer, little black book, job finder, digital camera, bar code scanner, web browser, stopwatch, regular watch, audio note taker, status symbol, etc... oh, and you can call people with it too.
hence why all phones here have so many features. take a cell phone away from your average japanese person and they would be a lost, clueless, introverted mess.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
No, he read the summary. You read his post but failed to comprehend it. He isn't saying that they aren't looking at multiple phones individually. He is saying that you should add up all the different phones that nokia sells with all the phone Apple sales to get a real comparison. Since Nokia sells a lot of different models, it is natural for Apple (which sells very few models) to have a model come out high on the list.
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Actually, a cheap quartz Timex is more accurate than a Patek Philippe, or any other mechanical watch. People don't buy mechanical watches for accuracy.
Are you adequate?
I wouldn't call it a troll just somewhat uniformed as SMS MMS isn't what they usually use in Japan, its an email based protocol. Some phones such as many Softbank phones come with SMS MMS but that's mostly for international use and the default messaging protocol is a form of push email. Tons of phones released in Japan do not have SMS MMS. Their largest carrier Docomo didn't have any for a long time until and when they did it was for their line international phone. SMS MMS is not an issue there.
I'm always surprised by the comments regarding Japan, the Japanese and their behavior. I lived the iPhone "revolution" from the inside in Japan, and the 3Gs being -now- at the top of the sales is not a surprise.
Initially, a bit more than a year ago, when SoftBank released the iPhone, it didn't work well for a number of reasons
1. The success abroad of the iPhone made the competition on the watch, this was reflected by a lot of bad publicity directed to the iPhone in the news
2. SoftBank initial contract requested to make an advance of 70,000 yen, besides the regular fees
3. SoftBank and their many pitiful shops gave an image (at the time) that did not go in par with the luxurious iphone
4. Many critics emerged (cannot change battery, fingernail insensitive screen, no TV, slow battery life [was true at the time], no cut&paste, can be slow)
5. Finally, many people were waiting for their contract with their current carrier to end.
Then at the end of 2008, SoftBank offered the iPhone (8GB) for zero yen (16GB was 400yen/m). From that time, little by little, it interested more and more people. Most of the foreigners I know got an iPhone.
I would say that things started to change from Spring 2009. Japanese amazing applications started to be advertised on TV etc...
Then arrived the 3Gs (June) and, at the same time, more and more Japanese wanted an iPhone.
The Japanese prefer the latest releases, and there is not much difference between the price of the 3Gs (monthly) compared to the 3G 16B.
Thus, when the "iPhone mania" started, everybody got the last one: the 3Gs.
The sales recommend the 3Gs simply because it is the last, and it's faster, longer battery life AND because the compass eases a lot the GPS navigation.
Not the voice control! Please, this is a joke. Nobody cares about that, here.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Precisely. I also just got a free ipod touch with a recent laptop purchase and to my huge surprise, I think the thing is as cool as all get out. I'm a serious computer dork and I didn't want one of these things at all because I didn't think that having one of these was worth bothering with when I can just use a regular computer just as easily. However, I've found I'm using the ipod touch to do more and more of my non intensive tasks and just leaving the computer off. Once you jailbreak it, you can do quite a bit of things that a normal computer would do (e.g. mount it with sshfs, transfer files to it, etc.)
The difference between the iphones and other cell phones is that the iphone is actually a really cool device, not just a phone. The last cell phones I have gotten from Motorola have gotten progressively worse (!) in terms of UI and even just plain reliability. Not to mention just about any kind of phone is much more limited than what the ipod touch does. E.g. my girlfriend's "smart" phone does e-mail, but no web-browser, and even if you have a web-browser, often it's a crippled in functionality and not nearly as nice to use as the zooming features on Safari. We get articles about the ipod and iphone because they blow just about every other device out of the water. Other phones might have similar functionality, but tend to not be as easy to use, or aren't designed well, etc.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
The other day my friend was showing off his iphone with some silly 3D games.
Later when we tried to send mp3 files through bluetooth, his iphone couldn't do it, but I've done it many times with other phones.
Either their bluetooth implementation is incomplete, or it is intentionally crippled.
If it had full working bluetooth, microSD slot, exchangeable batteries, and a better application distribution policy, I would think about buying one.