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iPhone Has 46% of Japanese Smartphone Market

Posted by kdawson on from the it's-little-it's-lovely dept.

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."

11 of 214 comments (clear)

  1. Remember when smartphone meant something? by 0xdeadbeef · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Remember when smartphone meant something? by 0xdeadbeef · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Yeah, I've been googling those names, and every one I don't recognize is either running Windows Mobile (and most of those manufactured by HTC) or a rebranded Nokia device. Where are those amazing homegrown wonders that make the Japanese market so hard to crack?

    2. Re:Remember when smartphone meant something? by MBGMorden · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I must concur. I'm male, but having let several females play with my iPod Touch (I swear the girls of the nation of gone phone-crazy - pulling out something new is like going to the park with a cute puppy these days), they all loved the interface. Despite my dislike of their marketing and control techniques regarding 3rd party apps, they certainly nailed the interface.

      Comparatively my actual phone is a Motorla Krave ZN4. I figured "touchscreen - it's gotta be good right?". Um, no. It's like they took the iPhone to an illiterate melon farmer from 200 years ago and asked him to make his best copy of it. It's less sensitive, less accurate, and the whole feel of the interface is just wrong compared to the iPhone.

      I haven't played with the Droid Eris yet (quite possibly my next phone) but I'm hoping for the feel of the touchscreen it leans more towards iPhone than towards my Krave.

      --
      "People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
  2. Re:So why is XBox unpopular? by introspekt.i · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Maybe people don't care as much about the extra features as much as (you|they) thought they did.

  3. Re:Great news! by TheKidWho · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm actually confused, I thought from reading around on slashdot that Japanese phones were 10+ years ahead of American ones? How did we catch up so quickly? Who invented the Time Machine?

  4. Interesting by mcsqueak · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  5. The smartphone market in Japan is tiny by kisielk · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:The smartphone market in Japan is tiny by kisielk · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I never said I don't think iPhone isn't any good. I'd own one myself if I had the means. I had a Japanese filp phone while I lived there, and while it didn't have an app store it was more than good enough for GPS mapping, browsing the net, email, etc. Sure I couldn't download a bunch of fancy Google apps, but I didn't strictly need them. Best of all, it was free with a one year contract because it was older than 6 months.

  6. Re:So why is XBox unpopular? by b1t+r0t · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's mostly because Xbox hardware is a piece of crap that dies easily. And the Japanese don't take that kind of shit lightly, especially when a company tries to hide he magnitude of the problem.

    It doesn't help any that in Japanese culture, the "X" symbol indicates failure, and there is also a kanji with an "X" in a box (unicode 51F6) that means "bad luck" and "disaster".

    --

    --
    "Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
    "Open source is evil." - Microsoft
  7. Bogus survey? by burnin1965 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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...

    "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3"

    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...

    [Querying whois.arin.net]
    [whois.arin.net]

    OrgName: Amazon.com, Inc.
    OrgID: AMAZO-4
    Address: Amazon Web Services, Elastic Compute Cloud, EC2
    Address: 1200 12th Avenue South
    City: Seattle
    StateProv: WA
    PostalCode: 98144
    Country: US

    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.

  8. Japanese buy smart phones? by Ogive17 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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."