Smartphones in Japan

How iPhone became so popular in Japan. The key is the Japanese women’s buying power! 

Japan has been a late adopter when it comes to smartphones, but it’s catching up quickly. Already more than half the population owns one. But Tokyo is a crowded city, and warnings are being issued about the risk of mass collisions among phone-using pedestrians at one busy crossing. Japanese people have realized smartphones are just too useful to ignore, especially because they can be used to read newspapers and manga, the Japanese comics which have gone global, without straining your eyes.

It’s that glacial pace people only adopt when they are starting at a phone screen-their head down, arms outstretched, looking like zombies trying to find human prey. (read more on bbc)

Japan’s Dimwitted Smartphones

Tokyo-Flat-panel television sets, most bearing Japanese brands, have long filled the north end of the sales floor, where the store’s best-selling products reside. These days, amid slumping sales, the rows of the TVs are relegated to the store’s cramped second-floor quarters to make room for hundreds of accessories for smartphones-specifically the distinctively non-Japanese iphone from Apple Inc. The store’s decision shows the what has behallen Japan’s technology industry. Once-powerful electronics conglomerates, which bet it all on TVs and missed the smartphone wave, are on the outside looking in.

Smartphones are now playing center stage in the consumer-electronics world, not only delivering staggering sales growth, but also cannibalizing sales of digital cameras, portable game machines and other strongholds of Japanese electronics. Today Apple and Samsung Electronics Co’s are enjoying record profits and are combining for some 54% of global smartphone shipments in the first quarter, according to research firm Strategy Analytics. (read more on world street journal)

The Japanese were using their cellphones to watch TV, navigate with GPS, download music, make movies, pay bills, and check their emails years before American consumers were doing the same. Japan also had touchscreen phones eight years earlier than iPhone-the Pioneer J-PE01. And yet it is no surprise that Apple’s iPhone was the best-selling phone in Japan last year. What happened? Japanese mobile phone guru Nobuyuki Hayashi believes that there are three main reasons Japan has fallen out of love with its own handset makers. First he says, you have to understand what a colossal and unexpected hit the iPhone was with Japanese women.

Japan has phones just as good-looking as the iPhone. The once popular Infobar candy bar phone even won international design prizes. But the craze for the iPhone, despite lacking all the bells and whistles Japanese telecoms executives thought were indispensable proved overwhelming. Apple now have 15% market share putting it ahead of Japan’s Sharp and Fujitsu, which both enjoy 14% of the market according to IDC. He adds that such tinkering makes the phones-based on Android-too feature-heavy, too complicated, and unstable battery drains.

“As Steve Jobs once said, Japanese manufacturers’ biggest mistake is they didn’t realize how important software technology has become. Most of the executives at Japanese consumer electronics manufacturers were hardware engineers, and they don’t get the importance of software or how software business works.” he says. (read more on fortune)