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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 evil." - Microsoft
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.
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