That is one of the results from a survey conducted by P+Nest Research Institute on two of their mobile partner sites. Within 1day 1001 female and high school and junior high school students voluntarily participated in a mobile survey about personal homepage usage.
In Japan young people use the word ‘hompe’, the short word for homepage, not only for homepages but also for profile services and SNS on the mobile web. Users can write user profiles, diaries, bulletins and even novels and contribute to each other in real time.
The usage of ‘hompe’ is extraordinarily high in Japan, especially for young girls. Asked about “how many of their friends and classmates have a ‘hompe’?”, 37.7% of female junior high school students and 47.9% of high school students answered: “all of them”. Everyday 45.6% of junior high school students and 48.6% of high school students spend at least 1h updating their own sites or writing real time contributions to other sites. The purpose of writing ‘hompe’ is slightly different between female junior high and high school students. 45.1% of junior high school students’ intention is to “communicate with their friends”. Contrarily female high school students seem to get more self-centered and individual after they turn 16. Their purpose for writing on ‘hompes’is to keep “individual records about themselves” (48.6%). Communication is still the main purpose. But while it’s more like active “chatting” for junior high students, high school students tend to write it more like an egocentric ‘blog’. They write about themselves as an ‘idol’ (star) and want others to be interested in them. Their participation in others gets more passive.
The most popular mobile ‘hompe’ service site is homepe ‘＠peps!’; most used profile sites are ‘Chip!!’ and ‘zentraku profile’
The Japanese cell phone market is hard to crack for western telecommunication companies. That’s something that also Nokia, the biggest mobile carrier in the world, had to experience and finally pull out of Japan completely in late November 2008.
Japan is the most advanced mobile phone market in the world and the Japanese customers are used to be provided with the latest technology handsets and innovative content on a regular basis. Functionality and usability are on the highest level and every season Japanese can choose out of a huge range of newly designed phones, fulfilling all needs of very specific user groups. The times are long gone when cell phones where mainly communication devices. Most Japanese rarely even use their mobile phones for calling.
Japanese “Keitai” (cell phone) are every day lifestyle items that represent the user’s personality. Japanese literally live with their mobile phones. They wake up in the morning by their phone’s timer, pay their bus or train ticket to school or work with their phone, write SNS and blogs in the train, watch TV in their break times, pay for their lunches or do mobile shopping. On the way home they play mobile games, download music or videos, read the news or surf the mobile internet. Many Japanese even sleep with their phones in their hands.
Japanese have a high brand awareness and interest in quality design and lifestyle products from overseas. Exactly these factors made Apple’s iPod a top seller in Japan. When in July 2008 the iPhone finally arrived to Japan, people build long lines and waited for days in front of the Softbank shops, just to be one of the first to posses an iPhone. In spite of high handset and data plan prices, sales were good for some weeks and people rumored that the iPhone could make it in the Japanese market. Also there is no offical data available, it is said that Softbank sold about 400.000 iPhones in the first 3 weeks. But then, after just some weeks the euphoria was gone and therefore the sales went low. Very low!
The iPhone lacked too much of the standard features of Japanese phones. Beginning with the hardware, the iPhone’s camera has only 2 mega pixels, doesn’t have auto focus and macro functionality, necessary for QR code scanning and the positioning of the camera makes it difficult to make pictures of yourself. Also the screen resolution is way behind the time in Japan, battery life is low and movies can’t be taken. Also incompatibility with flash, which is preinstalled on 90% of Japanese phones (flashlite), the lack of applications in Japanese language, no Emoji (emoticons) support and the missing copy & paste function didn’t appeal to the Japanese customer. Besides false marketing, rumors about broken handsets, guarantee issues and bad service took the rest to make Japanese think the iPhone is no use for the Japanese.
Then Softbank put a lot of effort and money in commercials, increasing the awareness of the iPhone in Japan. Firmware updates fixed some software issues and with the external 1seg adapter lacking hardware features were tried to be fixed. Also iPhone commercials are seen anywhere, nor Softbank nor Apple released any figures or information on iPhone sales in Japan. And that can’t be seen as a sign that the iPhone sells well here. Then on Feb 25th Softbank announced a new campaign called “iPhone for everybody” to increase iPhone Sales in Japan. Starting on Feb 27th, lasting till may 31st, subscribers for a new 2 years contract will get the 8gb iPhone completely for “free”. The 16gb model will be extremely reduced to one eights of the former price of 80.520yen (823$) to 11.520yen (115$). In addition Softbank reduces the prices for flat rate data plans from 5.985yen (62$) to 4.410yen (45$) per month. If this drastic price reductions doesn’t help the iPhone sell in Japan, nothing will. In economic times like these also Japanese consumers, who keep showing a high consumption rate through the long time of recession in Japan, might be finally convinced, attracted by that cheap offer and help the iPhone survive or even boost in Japan. Let’s see what the next month bring.
Now it is official: mobile carrier E-Plus will shut down the German version of the Japanese DoCoMo service by April 1st 2008. i-mode was introduced in June 2005 and has never been successful due to limited CHTML support on German handsets. Interestingly, the provider justifies the stop by reasoning that such a wide range of content doesn’t fit to their strategy anymore. Instead, they want to concentrate on their basic WAP portal and surf&rail flat rate.
The last two days, Tokyo witnessed the first MySQL users conference in Asia. Held in the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation (Miraikan) in Odaiba, it was a very informative event in a relaxed atmosphere.
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