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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."
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.
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?
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.
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".
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"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
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."