Useless Survey: 91% of Japanese Will Not Buy 'iPhone'

[megfilmworks]

The young Japanese love American music and style. They love the iPod.
The iPhone may not take over the Japanese IT market but I predict it will more than make up for it with sales to the young and stylish Japanese buyers.

 

[mavis]

The young Japanese love American music and style.

I love blanket statements like these ...

Anyway, there are several problems for young buyers. First, the data plans are likely to be priced similar to existing plans, which run about $100/month for unlimited transfers. That's just for data - extras like SMS, voice calling, etc are also quite expensive. This may prove to be too much for many young people. Also, many young people do not have computers at home, especially not computers of their own. This is why mobile devices are used to access the internet more than computers, here in Japan. Finally, Japanese people (particularly young people) use emoji extensively in their day to day SMS and MMS/emails. If the iPhone doesn't support this Japan-only feature, I expect that will turn off a lot of people here (again, particularly young people) ...

Just a few thoughts. I do believe the iPhone will be wildly successful here, just maybe not in the demographic you're referring to.

 

[yyy]

They only asked about 400 people out of Japan's more than 127,433,000 population? And in an online survey? That seems highly inaccurate to me

Anyway, If it doesn't become a success in Japan, they can always bring it to Israel, where they can't wait to have an official release of the iPhone. They've even created a group with almost 1000 members in an attempt to promote its release there: link

 

[maokh]

My iPhone attracts ooo's and aww's in japan..even in airplane mode. People know what it is, even though it is not anywhere on the japanese consumer's radar. Compared to the garbage on the market right now, it has a potential of being some sort of niche hit. Handset and plan cost is probably the biggest issue though.

Yes, our technology is seriously behind that of the Japanese.

The density of their population has allowed certain technologies to be adopted quickly.

If Japanese or Korean companies had to offer the capabilities they offer now, but across the width of North America, things would have moved more slowly.

The japanese are not ahead of the US in technology. Air interfaces (the cellular systems as we know it) have been parallel with the US ever since 2001 or so. Sometimes the US has actually lead. Infact, 3G adoption in Japan was, up to recently, very lousy. It wasn't until they forced all new subscribers to 3G systems where the subscriber count finally entered into the millions. Everyone seems to run around with crap PHS phones still to this day.

It has a lot to do with cost more than anything. they'll try to sell you video calling..but nobody actually uses it.

Population density is in no way related to how fast technologies are adopted. Its simply the culture. You can even see old grandmas texting on the train and realize that the country isnt afraid to push more than just the talk and end buttons on their handsets.

 

[happydude]

Yes, our technology is seriously behind that of the Japanese.

The density of their population has allowed certain technologies to be adopted quickly.

If Japanese or Korean companies had to offer the capabilities they offer now, but across the width of North America, things would have moved more slowly.

what explains the 5 year step backward in the u.s. in not offering picture messaging for the iphone?

 

[jigs]

just chiming in to say that, from personal experience, almost every japanese person i know has talked to me about the iphone these past couple weeks...there are so many people here i know that want one and cant wait.
perhaps its just the crowd i work with, but i have a feeling its gonna really gonna take off here.

i'd agree with previous poster comments that features like the tv and 'keitai saifu' will not be missed by many outside of tokyo. i see people using the infrared and bar code reader most often and missing that, if anything, may be a turn-off for some, but for most people i think the feature is a 'minor' convenience.

as a matter of personal opinion, i think what will be the biggest selling point for japan will be osx. osx's fluidity, consistency, and design still blows away any o/s ive seen on any keitai here. to be frank, one of the biggest culture shocks that i had when i came here was that even though japan may be known for its advanced electronics, most japanese (aged 30+) i've met are not that technologically inclined. i am usually the one showing them the features on the copier/computer/keitai. the simplicity and user-friendliness of osx will be a refreshing alternative to the choppy and sometimes convoluted o/s's that currently run on the phones here.

ive already seen a couple commercials from docomo pushing their new phone and its 'amaizingu uzaa ekusupiriansu.' (my katakana-english, not theirs) i think its safe to say both docomo and au are scrambling to get something together that can compete.

...and i have the worst luck. i bought a new $350 phone just days before i read the rumor that apple was in talks with softbank for japan. anyone want to buy a cool japanese keitai?

 

[shiba11]

After the take over of Vodafone KK

Softbank a Chinese or Korean company President , Bought out Vodafone kk (Japan) their handsets have never been so popular. Vodafone Japan was having a tough time in the local market, using Beckham as a popular force in advertising. The best operators in Japan with the nicest and sleekest phones are KDDI ( AU) and DOCOMO Japan Telecom Giant NTT.
Many Japanese do not like to support Korean and Chinese backed companies.
Why should they when Chinese and Korean students flood the internet with derogatory comments towards the Japanese.

 

[mavis]

Many Japanese do not like to support Korean and Chinese backed companies.
Why should they when Chinese and Korean students flood the internet with derogatory comments towards the Japanese.

Please keep Japanese xenophobia out of the discussion ...

 

[kabunaru]

Softbank a Chinese or Korean company President , Bought out Vodafone kk (Japan) their handsets have never been so popular. Vodafone Japan was having a tough time in the local market, using Beckham as a popular force in advertising. The best operators in Japan with the nicest and sleekest phones are KDDI ( AU) and DOCOMO Japan Telecom Giant NTT.
Many Japanese do not like to support Korean and Chinese backed companies.
Why should they when Chinese and Korean students flood the internet with derogatory comments towards the Japanese.

A lot of Asian countries do hate each other.

 

[DMann]

A lot of Asian countries do hate each other.

Slavery and abuse might have had something to do with it.

 

[mavis]

Wirelessly posted (iTouch 1.1.4 (pWN'd + JB'd): Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A102 Safari/419.3)

A lot of Asian countries do hate each other.

Slavery and abuse might have had something to do with it.

Thanks for the history lesson. Let's try to stay on topic.

 

[Shasterball]

Wow... Shouldn't there be a little more scrutiny regarding the types of polls posted here?

 

[voicegy]

Wait and see

Survey's are generally worthless especially when not taking into account updated, or soon to be updated, content (of what the survey was trying to accomplish)

We have a user here in Japan who says there's general excitement over the iPhone.

Let's see how well it will do in a couple of weeks. Opening this many markets at the same time for the iPhone will show an uptick in general for the device, not only in interest, but purchases. That's clear from any perspective, and who needs a survey to predict that?

 

[wasabi2k]

I doubt the article. Iphone will be big in Japan just on the brand itself.

Think Cool, Think Hip, Think Apple... Think Iphone

 

[CaptainHaddock]

Finally, Japanese people (particularly young people) use emoji extensively in their day to day SMS and MMS/emails. If the iPhone doesn't support this Japan-only feature, I expect that will turn off a lot of people here (again, particularly young people) ...

I agree fully. I receive a lot of messages that are 30% emoji, and often even use icons as a sort of rebus in place of kanji. Both sending and reading these would be impossible on the iPhone. In addition, Softbank now offers デコレメール (decore-mail) on all or nearly all their phones, which allows you to send MMS with a vast range of icons and clip-art as well as different font sizes and colours. Needless to say, these won't work on the iPhone (not to mention that it doesn't have MMS at all). Any young person going into Softbank to get an iPhone will probably be talked out of it by the salespeople.

 

[goblues11]

9% is 11 MILLIONhttp://images.macrumors.com/vb/images/smilies/smile.gif

 

[(L)]

While HWR for Japanese isn't there yet, the iPhone does support two other VERY intuitive Japanese input methods (intelligent romaji entry and a kana pad):

https://www.macrumors.com/iphone/2008/05/05/japanese-input-keyboards-on-iphone-2-0/

The kana pad is very intuitive and works the exact same way text entry does on current japanese cell phones.

In the words of someone (else) from japan:

[The last quote was about someone declaring Apple's way to be a huge improvement over that which exists already, using the endearing term "SUCKS."]

Sorry, but I'm pretty sure that as a Japanese living in Tokyo, your view here is highly optimistic.

What you say makes sense if the game were one of trying to poop out phonetic possibilities (refer to your own link). However, current text conversion software does a whole lot more than what Apple seems to have slapped together. The fact is that apart from the small conversion box (which certainly does have room for improvement), the term "SUCKS" isn't very appropriate when it is smart enough to come up with common phrases instead of phonetic declensions. That is, typing in "o-hi-sa" gets you "o-hi-sa-shi-bu-ri-de-su," or "long time no see," for example. If you know Japanese, you know this to be very useful, as there are so many frequently used phrases of the sort. Typing in "o-he-sa," you want to get the same. In either case, you shouldn't see "a-ha-sa," which means nothing, or "a-ho-sa," which declares yourself to be an idiot, but Apple's conversion would probably give this, judging from the link we've all seen, because all it does is cycle through phonetic possibilities and then convert those to kanji where possible.

To a student learning Japanese, that might be useful. To a Japanese, it's a farce. Any idea that Apple throwing something so primitive together should somehow turn out to be a vast improvement is difficult to entertain, especially since Apple's text conversion is a couple steps behind Windows's on computers.

I understand wanting to be optimistic, but this in all respects looks like Apple doing the least it can to have the iPhone be marketable at all, and this naturally falls far short of what the Japanese demand of their cell phone markets.

 

[(L)]

Referenced quote:

Originally Posted by shiba11
Many Japanese do not like to support Korean and Chinese backed companies.
Why should they when Chinese and Korean students flood the internet with derogatory comments towards the Japanese.

Please keep Japanese xenophobia out of the discussion ...

While I too find Japanese xenophobia problematic, shiba11 seems to make some kind of odd connection between what people notice Chinese and Korean students to be doing on the net versus what Japanese consumers in general feel.

Xenophobia is a fear of foreigners. Not wanting to support foreign companies is a matter of a belief in the superiority of Japanese products, economics, and lastly a matter of racism, I think usually in that order. Panasonic and Sony and Toshiba do better than Samsung and... I can't think of any Chinese label... partly because their products are more advanced, though the others might be cheaper. I don't think people avoid Samsung very often for racist reasons, though there may well be a tendency to trust names that are seen as better brands -- like Sony or Panasonic. I certainly don't think people avoid Samsung because they are afraid of Koreans.

(Also, I'm not defending shiba11's view. I don't see the connection.)

 

[(L)]

My iPhone attracts ooo's and aww's in japan..even in airplane mode. People know what it is, even though it is not anywhere on the japanese consumer's radar. Compared to the garbage on the market right now, it has a potential of being some sort of niche hit. Handset and plan cost is probably the biggest issue though.

The japanese are not ahead of the US in technology. Air interfaces (the cellular systems as we know it) have been parallel with the US ever since 2001 or so. Sometimes the US has actually lead. Infact, 3G adoption in Japan was, up to recently, very lousy. It wasn't until they forced all new subscribers to 3G systems where the subscriber count finally entered into the millions. Everyone seems to run around with crap PHS phones still to this day.

It has a lot to do with cost more than anything. they'll try to sell you video calling..but nobody actually uses it.

Population density is in no way related to how fast technologies are adopted. Its simply the culture. You can even see old grandmas texting on the train and realize that the country isnt afraid to push more than just the talk and end buttons on their handsets.

Basically this whole post is backwards. It should read, "oohs and ahhs about shiny design but not much about Japanese text input," and "Japanese are years ahead of American cellular technology, and even how much plans cost," and "population density does have a great deal to do with adoption of technology, because it means services that are provided regionally can be done so more easily and people will be quicker to copy their neighbors."

PHP is still used, yes, but you'd only ever make a statement like "everybody seems to be using PHP" if you are hell bent on being surprised at how many there are. PHP still sells on the point that it can work in some areas cells don't, but I doubt you even knew that, and they are nowhere near the majority. In America, people seem to run around with crap phones with bad connections. It really does have to do a whole lot with the placement of cell towers.

Maybe it was opposite day for you, maokh? You talk some sense - like people not using video conferencing very much, or adoption having to do with culture. Population density is a big factor in culture, though. You also seem to confuse the technology used as being on par, whereas most people would recognize that the degree of implementation is quite different.