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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."
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.
It's probably because Sony, being Based in Tokyo, knows a heck of a lot more about Japanese Culture then Microsoft, an American Company who caters to Americans. Given that every game a Japanese Teenager would want to play (Meaning Anime style Haircuits and/or cool swords and guns) came out exclusively for the PS3.
The point is, a game console is dependant on games. Games are dependant on developers. Developers are influenced by culture.
Phones, however, are not so much. If it can talk, text, and email, its good to go. The iPhone is flashy, and possibly "better" than the other smartphones they've got selling over there.
Foreign has nothing to do with it.
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.
Maybe people don't care as much about the extra features as much as (you|they) thought they did.
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?
So, you're saying it's even more impressive, given that it's 46% of such a large pool?
Facebook is the new AOL
If it includes every device, wouldn't it be much harder for the iPhone to obtain 46%, so this would be a much more impressive achievement? I'd have to think that they narrowed the definition down for this study, to give them a much higher share than one might think..
~Mekkah
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.
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.
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.
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
And why is this news?
We didn't. The average Japanese cell phone is still vastly higher-tech than the average US cell phone.
In terms of feature set, the iPhone isn't particularly remarkable compared to run-of-the-mill Japanese handsets. The reason it's become so popular is the same reason it's done so everywhere else: the quality of the UI and the gestalt user experience absolutely blow everything else away.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
In certain senses they are, in certain senses they aren't. I'd argue that it really goes back to mean by "cellphone" and "being ahead in cellphones".
Traditionally, both because of technical necessity(tiny batteries, weak processors) and the telcom tradition(dumb edges, smart network) cellphones have existed on a sort of continuum between "dumb" phones(more or less basic handsets, with address book, spartan calendar, maybe an alarm function) 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. MMS/Camera with actual lense/QR Codes/WAP browser/ carrier audio/video store/embedded payment widgetry/etc/etc/etc/).
On that historic continuum, Japanese phones are overwhelmingly further toward the "feature" end than American phones are. American tech writers compare the spec lists of American and Japanese phones, and note that the latter are far longer, ergo they must be more futuristic.
Something like the iPhone(or WebOS devices, or Android), by contrast, doesn't really fall onto the dumbphone/featurephone continuum in any terribly useful way. Rather, these devices philosophically derive from the model of an internet-connected computer, that happens to have a more-or-less endurable set of phone features included.
Those commentators judging the new smartphone devices according to where they fell on the dumbphone/featurephone spectrum were inclined(correctly) to say that the iPhone and its ilk were inferior to existing devices. Particularly earlier variants(No MMS? No push email? shit camera? all worse than existing featurephone offerings). 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.
The fact that Apple generally knows their shit RE: UI design matters as well. Arguably, Microsoft was actually among the first to give the notion of the "smartphone" in the contemporary sense, a serious try. Cellular modem; but with a fairly powerful embedded platform, running an OS with explicit support for third party applications and the notion that they would be talking to the internet(even if MS would prefer that most of that talking just involve an activesync connection back to your corporate exchange server). All great in principle, it's just that windows mobile fucking sucked. Blackberries(which were entirely then, and still to a degree, are much closer to being "featurephones with really good email" than "smartphones") were a much better choice.
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.
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
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."
I didn't do what you think I just did.
Add together 24.6 and 21.5 (from the link you posted). I'll wait.
Oh also, you know how in America we tell people its good to buy American products? Well in other countries they don't tell each other to buy American products like we do! In Japan they would be more likely to buy a Japanese product over American.
Balderdash!
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.