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iPhone Has 46% of Japanese Smartphone Market
MBCook writes "Despite claims earlier in the year that the iPhone was hated by Japanese consumers (later disproved), the iPhone has been doing well in the land of the rising sun and the evidence is in. Apple has taken 46% of the Japanese smartphone market, cutting in half the once 27% market share of the previous lead, Advance Sharp W-Zero3 (Japanese site). The article includes a large chart of the market share of Japanese smartphones over the last 3 years."
And we all know why it's popular... It's so easy to watch tentacle themed animation!
The localized Apple commercials for the iPhone feature archival footage of Mothra and Gamera fighting and crushing Japanese cities.
"Need to call Godzilla for help, there's an APP for that."
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Wait they like iPhone? How can this be? But I thought XBox is unpopular in Japanese because they hate foreign products. I guess all this time it was because XBox sucks.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
You gotta wonder what those numbers actually mean. Are we just talking about being a big fish in a miniscule pond? My own personal observations don't correspond to the idea that a "Apple has a 46% share". They certainly don't seem terribly visible for "such a large share".
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Are their carriers getting crushed by heavy bandwidth users like AT&T?
It's my understanding that the average Japanese person is more likely to have a phone than a computer, and that the phone can do pretty much everything a computer can (albeit with a much smaller screen), including playing MMOs, watching TV, etc. While I can see why people might like the bigger screen, does the iPhone have the apps/functionality that the Japanese user wants?
CmdrTaco's micropenis has 46% of the Japanese male escort market.
No, that doesn't make any more sense either.
Ok. Iphone has 46% of smart phone market. It cut the leader lead from 27% to 13.5%. So the Leader has 59.5% of the market and Iphone 46%. Guess all the other smart phones are in negative numbers.
Am I the only one suspicious that they're using a rigged definition of "smartphone"? That is an awfully small list of phones for Japan. What is their criteria? How the hell could a Windows Mobile device even be number two? Beating that is like winning the Special Olympics.
Man, remember when people were pretending the iPhone was a smartphone before it had third party software, just to get it out of the feature phone category? Those were the days.
Apple is a strange beast. It's always seemed to aim at building a quality desktop for a restricted market which can afford it. It once lampooned Dell for being a company which makes profit on volume rather than quality. Even the click-wheel iPod remained steadfastly associated with its superior UI and superior price tag, and though it reached a mass market on "cool", it remained a winner on trademark usability and profit margin.
Then comes the iPhone, and with the iPhone comes a slurry of a very Microsoft form of press release, always discussing proportion of some market captured, number of apps downloaded, etc. The trait has trickled into their computer division, as they boast about "highest revenue in retail stores in the US in quarter X", or similar misleadingly over- or under-specified statistics. It's not that you can't make a huge profit, especially short-term, on running a business in this way. It's just not the Apple I knew from the '80s and early '90s.
The current favourite for Apple is "% of smartphone market" - this one is an easy winner, because private consumers tend not to need/care much for the full detail of smartphone features, but they do buy what's cool. And there's never been a cool smartphone before the iPhone. What is more, the market of private consumers always exceeds the market of business users, so figures illustrating the iPhone's usage where it might actually be useful are drowned out by Joe Public wanting what's shiny. Finally, private conumsers without the desire for bling or the means to obtain it just go for non-smartphones.
To summarise, iPhones would be expected to win the "consumer smartphone" quantity battle because they are the only well-established consumer smartphone. As a result, they automatically win the "smartphone" quantity battle. But this doesn't necessarily mean they are the favoured smartphone in any particular group of existing users making an informed choice. There's a good reason why there was no "switch" advert for iPhone as there was for Mac.
Now the definition has apparently widened to include so much junk, that the iPhone seem nearly divine by comparision.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
I myself can't wait to see how the iPhone mob around here spins this. I'm guessing they will take the "anti-iPhone sentiment is for conformist fags" approach.
What?! I'm just sayin'...
sudo apt-get lost
*troll mods coming soon*
The way I see it, the definition of smart phone used in the article is to make sure iphone comes out on top. It is back when engadget suddenly declared '99% of smartphone traffic on our mobile-specific website is from iphone' - the reason was that blackberry was identifying itself as full browser while engadget only targetted mobile specific browser and did the calculation.
This number means fuck-all.
You might expect appleinsider.com to have a small bias.
I was in Tokyo this past September, and I do remember spotting the iPhone there. However, it seems that many more people had flip phones. The typical flip phone style I saw was larger than those found here in America, to accommodate a bigger screen, and flatter then you'd see here. Many could do things such as watch TV, as my friend demonstrated on his phone.
I don't ever remember seeing a TV commercial for the iPhone, or any subway/train ads for the iPhone. I do remember seeing subway ads for other phones. And for Google, heh.
The article should read: The few people that are buying smart phones are buying iPhones.
Apple has a huge share of the TINY smart phone market. They key to this article is omitting the Smart phone market share.
Average Japanese phones are smart enough that smart phones are very unpopular in Japan. People who need to do more than surf and email carry laptops, and more recently "netbooks."
Also most people prefer the keypad over a keyboard for entering Japanese into their phones. This is just how Japanese is. So all those keypad phones are also unpopular.
slashdot. News for nerds - stuff that matters
hmmm, I don't really see how iphone sales in Japan falls into either of those categories?
maybe it should be:
slashdot. News for sales people - stuff that is irrelevant to technology
Maybe read the article? The 3G has 24.6% of the market. The 3GS has 21.5% of the market. That adds up to roughly 46%. The most popular phone in 2008 was the Sharp WillCOM W-Zero 3 Advance, and it held a 26.8% absolute market share. That is now 14.6%, meaning that the other smart phones share roughly 40% of the market.
Of course the article doesn't clearly define what 'market' that is.
as traditionally touch phones have suffered in asian countries where things like the stylus still reign supreme for complex alphabets. Apple must be really dedicated to the market, or must see some serious competition against their stateside market.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Hardly anyone in Japan actually uses a "smartphone". The regular flip phones are so full featured that there is not much need to. You can even download full TV series to your basic phone to watch while you ride the train. Between that, and email, and a few basic online apps, most consumers seem happy with their "bog standard" phones. The fact that a WinMo phone is in second place should be evidence enough that the smartphone market there is pretty much non-existant. Not once would you ever see someone on a WinMo phone.
Furthermore, phone fashion is a huge thing. While the iPhone is pretty nice by our standards, it's got nothing on some of the glitzy and sleek phones available there. Fashion also changes quickly, while the appearance of the iPhone has remained largely the same.
What exactly is the definition of a "smartphone"? Is it being able to install third party applications? In that case my previous phone from Sony Ericsson (released almost 4 years ago) and most phones sold are smart phones. Is it a touch interface? In that case there are several smartphones that run neither of the Operating Systems that a smart phone must have according to the article.
Before you can come up with a good impartial definition of the word "smartphone" you cannot know how large the market share of a specific smartphone is, or even if it qualifies as a smartphone.
...confirming it.
This is based on my previous experiences with the Apple RDB (reality distortion bubble), and how I have seen it make people want something so much, that they would even make it up.
I’m not making a statement about its truth. Just that because of that, Apple news get a harder time. Microsoft for example would get an even harder time. Like with everything where you got burned too often, before.
On top of that, I have problems believing, that an in all points inferior phone (Compared to the crazy stuff they got in Japan. Not what’s available in the US.) would dominate Japan... of all markets??
Anyone from Japan here, with a real world experience, of how many of the people he sees and knows got an iPhone?
It it rather close to half? Or rather rare? (Or where in-between?)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
And why is this news?
Oh what a convenient lack of the number 2 and movement of the decimal point...
Here’s the translated report:
http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.impressrd.jp%2Fnews%2F091210%2Fsmartphone2010&sl=ja&tl=en
Try to find anything else than the 24.6% in there!
LOL, and I thought I did go a bit too far in my previous comment, where I stated that the Apple reality distortion bubble would make people want it so much, that they would make things up.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
It's a different version over there - it's called the slant-iPhone.
Engadget Mobile provides a better perspective:
iPhone nabs 46 pecent of Japanese smartphone market, the tiny Japanese smartphone market
So you read a headline like "iPhone grabs 46 percent of the Japanese smartphone market" and the first thing you're likely to think is, "wow, Apple is really doing well for itself." Well, it is and it isn't. While it has made some considerable gains in the smartphone market at the expense of phones like Sharp's W-ZERO3 and the Willcom 03, it still hasn't gained nearly the same total mindshare or market share that it has over here. That's because "smartphones" as we know them are still a relatively small market in Japan, where carriers' lineups consist of a whole range of offerings including everything from mobile TV-equipped phones to true camera phones to perfume holders.
Source
Has there been any WHARGARBLE over Apple having a monopoly in the Japanese SmartPhone market?
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
as traditionally touch phones have suffered in asian countries where things like the stylus still reign supreme for complex alphabets.
Actually if you think about it, physical keyboards are a really bad idea for Asian countries - the input mechanism for Kanji and the like is actually really impressive on the iPhone, take a look:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzTYImxDzU8
The characters on the side are completions for the character you are drawing, plus there is completion of full phrases.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
As with the AdMob survey numbers based on web browsing hits this survey is suspicious.
Looking through my web server logs the only smartphone browser hits I get are from iPhone clients...
But considering the iPhone has only 15% or so actual market share I found it curious that they seem to hold such a large share of web browsing as evidenced on my own server, so I looked closer at where these clients originated using a whois of the IP addresses of some clients, 72.44.57.255, 174.129.64.115, 174.129.143.218, 67.202.4.57, etc...
Uh, WTF! Every single iPhone hit is from the Amazon cloud computing cluster.
Amazon runs their EC2 cloud computing cluster off iPhones? Something really fishy is going on here.
I spent 2 weeks in Japan (most of the time in Tokyo, Yokohama and Kyoto) and not once did I see a smart phone. Most people there use advanced flip phones. So smart phones have what, 5% of market share total and iPhone is 2.5% total? And that seems like a very generous guess based on my experience.
And I spent lots of time on the subway and various local trains and buses.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
..in anime, manga and other media.
If a phone shows up, chances are it's an iPhone, and often labelled as such. Given that anime is otherwise often home to such labels as Carbucks and McGonads (it's in english, therefore it's cool, never mind what it means), them being labelled correctly pretty much means Apple is paying for it.
So. Advertisement, and lots of it. Anyone closer to the country able to verify this?
Can someone please define 'smartphone. Until then, such statistics mean little. The only meaningful ones are shares of the entire phone market. Which for Q4 2009 is about 2.5% globally. Probably higher in the US, but I couldn't find US-only (or North America) figures.
"Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance." - G.K. Chesterton
I took a minute to knock up a more informative sales chart, a stacked graph by year.
I was in a rush so I skipped out the smaller sellers and a label for the Y axis.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Depends on what you call a "smart phone."
Japanese phones have been way ahead of American phones in terms of advanced features for years. They regularly make purchases right from their phone using "smart wallet" functions, something even the iPhone lacks.
So I take this news with a HUGE grain of salt.
I'm not doubting that the iPhone is popular in Japan, but when you consider that almost all phones in Japan could reasonably be called "Smart Phones" then I don't think that the iPhone represents 40% of that market.
Who invented the Time Machine?
Well, Apple did, of course!
USA! USA! Woooo!
And we didn't even need a "department of industry" to do it. ;)
Oh come on, how is that flamebait? He practically hosed the OP's flamebait down with an aqueous aspirated film-forming form.
The iPhone is closer to your typical BREW phone than it is to what I'd call a smart phone. It has an approval process for its app store (just like BREW - winmo, Android, etc.. have no such restrictions). Can't install apps EXCEPT through the app store (same as BREW - again, other smartphones have no such restrictions). Can only run a single app at a time (ditto). Can't customize the main screen (notice a trend yet?). The iPhone only gets called a smartphone because it had a good web browser - but installing Opera on a BREW phone doesn't suddenly make it a smartphone, just like the iPhone isn't a smartphone.
And yes I know you can jailbreak the iPhone, but that would just be hacking a "dumb" phone into a smartphone.
I think it has much to do with the fact that iphone cell plans in Japan are reasonably priced. http://plusd.itmedia.co.jp/mobile/articles/0912/01/news076.html (Japanese) Zero up front expense. The price of the iphone is amortized over the 24 month contract, then it is yours outright. Unlimited packets for 4410 yen (around $50 / month)
The smartphone market here is absolutely miniscule. I'm not sure what anyone would gain from getting a smartphone in Japan since the normal Japanese cell phone already has more features than the standard American smartphone, excepting support for corporate policies and the like. The Japanese language works very well on a numeric keypad; there's absolutely no reason to use a keyboard, which is one of the draws of a smartphone. Japanese phones all have dedicated application stores/game sites as well, so that's not a factor either. Streaming video, youtube support, nicodouga support... all there.
What the iPhone does offer (in addition to a nice UI and experience) is a fashion factor, I think. It looks neat, the case is cool, it's relatively unique, and it's "branded." In some small way, it's like LV or any other brand; there are people who want it for the brand.
This is just anecdotal, but I personally know three Japanese people who have iPhones. They all got them because it looked neat and was essentially free. Of those three, one of them loves it, one of them has gone back to her original phone because the iPhone is much harder to write e-mail on, and the last, an American, uses it grudgingly because he can't go back (switched companies for the iPhone). Why does he dislike it? It's missing a lot of basic things that you can expect on a good cell phone: good dictionary support, kanji lookup, kaomoji/emoji support, and a useful texting interface.
There's no way I'd trade my phone for the iPhone, personally. The odd thing is, my phone (au's SH003) is apparently an attempt to steal some of the iPhone's touch thunder -- it's got a normal form factor but the screen is also touch-capable... not that I use it.
http://www.tenjou.net/
Nobless Oblige. I mean can your iPhone order missile strikes?
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
iPhone may have 46% of the SMARTphone market in Japan but smartphones are not popular in Japan at all.
There's been no need for them. Non-smartphones do all the most useful things that users want and more in Japan. A typical Japanese NON-smart phone
*) Has a 5-12 megapixel camera
*) Browses the web just fine
*) Has 3D GPS based navigation
*) Receives digital TV signals with no carrier charge
*) Records those digital TV signals for later playback (pocket tivo)
*) Has it's own digital answering machine built in, no need for the phone company to record messages unless you have no signal and no need to call the phone company to hear your messages as they are already on the phone.
*) Has MP3/WMA/AAC playback
*) Plays games
*) Has RFID digital wireless payment system for paying for trains, subways, buses, vending machines, and most convenience stores.
*) Can download apps.
*) Has 2 displays, one inside the phone, one out.
*) Supports 500+ icon characters for email. (smiles, frowns, cakes, fireworks)
etc, etc, etc,
You only need to go on any train or subway car in Tokyo and look around and you'll notice it will take you 5 to 10 cars worth of people to see a single iPhone
Compare to say NYC or SF where you can go in any starbucks and it seems like every other person has an iPhone.
No, iPhone is no doing that well in Japan.
Except it's not "so popular" everywhere else - market share is a few percent.
The flaw in this article is that it's restricted it to the arbitrary ill-defined of "smartphone" which is assumed to include the Iphone, but not the vast range of "feature" phones that can still do Internet, run apps, and so on. If you took a stricter definition of phones - e.g., one that could run any 3rd party apps (as opposed to only those approved by the company), can multitask with 3rd party apps, has a real keyboard etc, then the Iphone is not a smartphone. If you take a definition broad enough to include it, then you include most feature phones.
So what's the Iphone's real market share in Japan?
Another point - presumably before this, another phone would have had the largest share in this ill-defined category. Note how we didn't get a story about that?
This story is as laughable as that one we had when the Iphone was the best selling phone in one random country for one month (right after the release of a new Iphone model). Note how since then, we've never had any articles for any month, for any country, of what the best selling phone is? Even though clearly you could have a story for every country, every single month, for some reason it's only notable when it's the Iphone. (So the fact that the Iphone has only been best selling for one month, in only one country, is surely quite bad...)
Today I bought myself a Nokia 5800. Great phone and at a decent price - but from reading Slashdot, I'd never even known it exists. News for nerds? Not anymore - I rely on the mainstream press now to find out news about the market leaders in this area.
and "feature" phones(still more or less inflexible, you get what the manufacturer and the carrier give you; but they give you all kinds of bells and whistles.
But all feature phones can run any app you like. They use Java rather than native code - but then I don't see why that's a bad thing, surely a common standard is good (and doesn't Android take the same approach, IIRC?) Meanwhile, look how locked down the Iphone is - you can only run apps that the manufacturer approve. So I don't think this is a good way to draw a distinction between smart and feature phones, especially if you want to claim that the Iphone is a smartphone...
What they missed, though, is that the smartphone is a fundamentally superior model, by virtue of being overwhelmingly more flexible and powerful than the fixed function phones, even if they happened to have a fairly large number of fixed functions.
What you're missing is that those feature phones still adopt this same model of an Internet-connected computer, and in no way are their functions fixed. My now ancient 2005 Motorola V980 that was my old function allowed me to install whatever apps I liked. My new Nokia 5800 is miles better yes - but there's no qualitative difference; it's rather the improvement of 4 years of advancement (and paying a higher price too). Just as a computer of today is is way better than one of 4 years ago, but no one would claim that they fall into different categories.
The big jump was between dumb phones, and feature/smart phones. It's there that you saw the leap from a phone that could only be a phone with maybe WAP, and fixed functions, to what was basically a handheld computer, allowing Internet access, applications, and running an OS. In the old days, we simply had dumb phones and smart phones. But since then, people had introduced this odd idea of "feature" phone, even though the feature phones are smart phones by the old definition. The only real difference is that "smart" phone seems to be reserved for phones that are high end - which isn't a hard definition, it tells us nothing about their features, and their capabilities change over time. The Iphone is only a smartphone by this definition because it's expensive.
And anyhow, even if we look at the devices labelled "smartphones", there were still plenty that also had the features that the Iphone missed. The criticisms were valid.
The iPhone was in the interesting position of being (arguably) the first "smartphone" well executed enough(and running on powerful enough hardware) to outcompete the far less flexible, but far more mature, "featurephone" segment for a large number of people.
What sort of ill-defined criterion is this? Do you have a citation? The Iphone is still a minority phone in the market, so what you say isn't true, it hasn't outcompeted feature phones on sales at all. If you mean to say it's selling better than earlier smartphones - well that's true of all smartphones - as time's gone on, their sales have increased. Nothing special about Apple.
And finally, please give me a definition of smartphone that includes the Iphone, but doesn't include these "feature" phones?
Ha - thanks for that, as I suspected.
So they are only doing well in an arbitrarily defined very small subset of the market, that's been defined to include them, and a small number of other phones, when actually most of the Japanese market are off buying other things to do the same thing.
Why not take it further, Apple fans? Just define the market to be the Iphone, and then you can say how Apple have 100% market share! :)
Good points regarding the statistics and selective reporting.
Antiquis temporibus, nati tibi similes in rupibus ventosissimis exponebantur ad necem.
It implies that 9 out of 10 times people choose some other product. OMG how dare they.
You could always define "smartphones" to be phones produced by Apple, then they could have 100% of that market.
Deleted
Yes.
I believe I overestimated the Slashdot community (for the most part anyway) by assuming they could differentiate between the OP and my rebuttal. I find the "You must be new here" meme to be applicable in this case.
sudo apt-get lost