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I was going to say the number one turn-off was the lack of three different fold-out keyboards, the ability to automate your home, four different sized blades, a corkscrew, magnifying glass and no hook for the charm attachment/lanyard/flashing LED dongle.
You appear to have missed out the tool for taking stones out of horses' hooves. How can anything be called a proper phone without one of those?
 
You appear to have missed out the tool for taking stones out of horses' hooves. How can anything be called a proper phone without one of those?

Damn, forgot about that - now it's really useless. How am I supposed to cope if my horse goes lame? I won't be able to ride to the top of the hill to get reception to download the latest update to Super Monkey Ball.

No wonder the Japanese don't like it.
 
the iPhone is pretty much a yawner over there.

It has a lame camera, no MMS, people in Japan don't use iTunes much, and the real turn off...NO hook for charm attachment.

:D on the charm attachment thing. My girlfriend has a ball of charms on hers weighing more than the phone itself. Some of the high end Japanese phones are pretty hefty, too.

But anyway, they don't really use MMS over there. They use e-mail :D
 
Bah! All your made up statistics are wrong. Its 97.3% of all statistics are made up. Jeesh! Everyone knows that!

;)
 
:D on the charm attachment thing. My girlfriend has a ball of charms on hers weighing more than the phone itself. Some of the high end Japanese phones are pretty hefty, too.

But anyway, they don't really use MMS over there. They use e-mail :D

This is true. I can't sms any of my friends in Japan. They use email on their phones.

The charm attachment ring is actually very important to the Asian girls. They love hanging all sorts of cute crap on their phones. I showed my previous Nokia 6500 to a colleague as she was intrigued by the slim form. The first thing she looked for was the charm attachment ring. When she realized there wasn't one, she was no longer interested. Funny.
 
The charm bit is true. A friends' sister visited form Japan last fall, she was excited to see my iphone, (sadly, that's all). Anyhow, after looking at the software, player, ect... She then looked over the outside, and asked why I didn't have a loop for the "charm". Yes, I needed an explanation.

She never even asked about the iphone a 2nd time after that. :(

FTW, she was (#*$ing HOT. Giggidy.

FYI - I honestly don't know what FTW means.
 
bah. japan. a sudoku game or other brain game using acelerators and these statistics will jump to an 50%

Masquerade is the only one who gets it.

Most features on Japanese mobile phones aren't that advanced. 1-Seg TV is the only thing I can think of that I've seen recently that was far beyond what we have in the US and even then most phones don't have that sort of functionality. Sure, you can get a phone with GPS and TV for $300, but if you're similar to the majority, then you'll be getting a slim phone with complicated menus that doesn't do much more than any given phone in the states.

However, with that said, as soon as somebody puts a few brain games out in the JA App store the iPhone will fly off the shelves as long as people aren't afraid of switching to SoftBank to get it. (SoftBank may be the biggest hurdle here, since DoCoMo and AU are more entrenched providers. And also more Japanese.)
 
Masquerade is the only one who gets it.

Most features on Japanese mobile phones aren't that advanced. 1-Seg TV is the only thing I can think of that I've seen recently that was far beyond what we have in the US and even then most phones don't have that sort of functionality. Sure, you can get a phone with GPS and TV for $300, but if you're similar to the majority, then you'll be getting a slim phone with complicated menus that doesn't do much more than any given phone in the states.

However, with that said, as soon as somebody puts a few brain games out in the JA App store the iPhone will fly off the shelves as long as people aren't afraid of switching to SoftBank to get it. (SoftBank may be the biggest hurdle here, since DoCoMo and AU are more entrenched providers. And also more Japanese.)

Brain games are what made the DS' popularity explode in Japan, so that'd make sense for the iPhone.

For some of the Japanese phones that do have tons of features, though, I don't get it. I can't think of many situations where I'd need to use the built-in camera to read in a bar code on someone's business card, or OCR some text, or watch TV w/ 1seg (if I'm in a place where I have time to watch TV, there's a TV nearby). Seems useless to me. Felica osaifu keitai would be pretty cool though - similar to the Octopus cards you can get in Hong Kong to pay to ride the MTR/KCR and pay at vending machines, etc, except on a phone. I'd actually find that useful.
 
That 9% would drop if Japanese people realized it doesn't do MMS. Most of the messages I send and receive are MMS. The difference between SMS and MMS is completely transparent on a Japanese phone — you just type up your message and the phone sends it by whichever means is appropriate. Maybe Softbank has arranged something with Apple, but if not, switching to an iPhone means I won't be able to receive half the messages my friends send me. I don't want to switch to Mail.app for casual messaging either. That's unacceptable no matter how cool the phone is.
 
That sounds a little high to me. I work where we have a lot of japanese students that come over here for acouple months and the first thing a lot of them did when they got here was go buy an iphone. I would say atleast half of the students have one.
 
That 9% would drop if Japanese people realized it doesn't do MMS. Most of the messages I send and receive are MMS. The difference between SMS and MMS is completely transparent on a Japanese phone — you just type up your message and the phone sends it by whichever means is appropriate. Maybe Softbank has arranged something with Apple, but if not, switching to an iPhone means I won't be able to receive half the messages my friends send me. I don't want to switch to Mail.app for casual messaging either. That's unacceptable no matter how cool the phone is.

Strange, when I went to Japan (in 2003 BTW) one of the things that impressed me was that phones didn't bother with the crap that SMSs/MMSs are: they just use e-mail.
 
What a load of complete rubbish!!!

They survey'd 402 people. Yes, that's 402 people, and 91% came back saying they wouldn't want a 3g iphone. That's 366 (ish) people out of a population of how many people?

127.4 million!

As with all survey's/studies etc, take them with a complete pinch of salt. It's like TV ratings. They didn't *count* 18million people watching Pop Idol. They survey'd about 5 thousand, and multiplied that number to reach an average of the population.

It's all completely made up.
 
My partner (UK) *loves* her charm dangling things on her phone. Problem is most of them fall apart after a couple of months. Where could I get decent charms?
 
Best place to get those charms?

Japan.

You can't seem to buy ANYTHING out there without them stuffing one of those charms into the deal. I mean from video games, to beer, to tampons.

I wish I was joking.
 
What a load of complete rubbish!!!

They survey'd 402 people. Yes, that's 402 people, and 91% came back saying they wouldn't want a 3g iphone. That's 366 (ish) people out of a population of how many people?

127.4 million!

As with all survey's/studies etc, take them with a complete pinch of salt. It's like TV ratings. They didn't *count* 18million people watching Pop Idol. They survey'd about 5 thousand, and multiplied that number to reach an average of the population.

It's all completely made up.

Eh... not always. If it's a big enough and diverse enough sample it's valid.
 
That 9% would drop if Japanese people realized it doesn't do MMS. Most of the messages I send and receive are MMS. The difference between SMS and MMS is completely transparent on a Japanese phone — you just type up your message and the phone sends it by whichever means is appropriate. Maybe Softbank has arranged something with Apple, but if not, switching to an iPhone means I won't be able to receive half the messages my friends send me. I don't want to switch to Mail.app for casual messaging either. That's unacceptable no matter how cool the phone is.

Really? 99% of the messages I receive are e-mail. The only MMS/SMS messaging I get is DoCoMo's stupid advertisements that I can't turn off.
 
What a load of complete rubbish!!!

They survey'd 402 people. Yes, that's 402 people, and 91% came back saying they wouldn't want a 3g iphone. That's 366 (ish) people out of a population of how many people?

127.4 million!

As with all survey's/studies etc, take them with a complete pinch of salt. It's like TV ratings. They didn't *count* 18million people watching Pop Idol. They survey'd about 5 thousand, and multiplied that number to reach an average of the population.

It's all completely made up.

What is your education level? :p
 
A statistical poll is always taken from a small sample of people. The sample has to be diverse and include different types of people from various walks of life. As long as the sample is large enough to include enough of the different types of people, it can be indicative of what the mass population would say to within a few percentage points.

That is how almost all research studies are compiled, not just this one.
 
A statistical poll is always taken from a small sample of people. The sample has to be diverse and include different types of people from various walks of life. As long as the sample is large enough to include enough of the different types of people, it can be indicative of what the mass population would say to within a few percentage points.

That is how almost all research studies are compiled, not just this one.

A critcial design element in any statistical sampling is how to successfully achieve "different types of people" (eg, randomness).

Unfortunately, what has become all too common today - - especially in "Internet Polls" is the profound flaw of not achieving a random sample, but instead getting what is known as a "self selected" sample.

This is known to be capable of significantly biasing the results of any such 'survey' to make its data absolutely useless from an objective statistical perspective. It is even worse if an open survey is vulnerable to being "mailbombed" by a self-selected group.

In any event, there's also the application of media spin in how even valid data is reported. In this case, one can claim "90% don't want it" or one can say "10% of a population of a gazillion Japanese do want it" - - its the same data, but different message.

For example, assuming that the real number is indeed the same as reported {90% don't / 10% do}, from Japan's population of 127 million, this would effectively mean that Apple could potentially going to double their iPhone sales from just the introduction Japanese market. Gosh, that really sounds like a horrible failure for Apple, doesn't it?

Finally, there can also be nuances in how a survey question is worded in terms of the resulting response rate. We haven't seen exactly how this one was worded, but it may have had the phrasing of "Are you going to buy it immediately upon its initial release?" As such, this 9% or 10% level of interest represents just the initial sales surge. Again, it has profoundly different implications on the product's potential business success/failure.

The bottom line is that there's not really enough information available from the originating source to really dig down into this important details to really determine what the truth is. As such, its probably safer to apply the rule of thumb that if someone isn't being fully transparent with the statistics that they're claiming to report, the statistics have probably been manipulated to serve their agenda. As such, the source is probably better to be ignored as not being particularly credible.


-hh
 
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