Japan Mobile Wrap – Week Ending 24 August
Obviously it’s been rather quiet on the mobile tech news front here this week. While WWJ could blame that on taking a little R&R at the beach, but the truth is we have been very hard at work to finish our Japan Mobile research report. However, we decided to put together a few quick tidbits that caught our eye this week, after the jump.
In no specific order:
PSP announces a voice deal, dubbed Go!Messenger, with British Telecom.
We also noticed that PSP will get a 1seg digital-tv tuner here in Japan 😎
Asahi Shimbun reported that a moshi moshi denwa phone can fetch a whopping 50 million yen or about $430,000, diamond encrusted models would cost extra.
Panasonic seems to think people need help to upload their camerphone photos to mixi..?!?
The Age pointed out that Hitachi is working on technology for 3D phones.
KDDI announced they have sold 5 million 1seg enabled phones, with a total of 21 digital broadcast enabled models now available. The company also introduced their new A5528K ‘Easy’ handset with a campaign offering $500 prizes for 50 lucky winners.
FAST and Rakuten announce a mobile search joint venture, building on an established relationship dating back to 2003.
And finally, K-Lab released survey results on usage trends for manga (comics) on mobile phones, best effort machine translation below:
Investigation is conducted and the number of effective replies is 7,875 persons. A male is 44% and the woman of a respondent’s woman ratio is 56%. Teens – 12%, twenties – 35%, 30’s 2%, 40’s – 37%, 50’s – 14%. Represented by operator: NTT DoCoMo user, 48%, KKDI/au user 46% and the Softbank user 6%.
First, the place which collected the reply from ten choices to three about the use trend of the electronic comic for cellular phones, In an affirmative choice, “since it can read always anywhere, it is good” 22%, In “it is good since it is not troubled by – space which is not bulky”, “it is good from KOSSORI ???” 17% 12%, It is a tendency which chooses the reply as which “it is good since it is not necessary to go to a bookstore and to search” evaluates 9%, “it uses since it is cheap rather than he buys a comic” evaluates 5%, and “it is good since it is easy to read” estimates convenience by 3% rather than a price.
On the other hand, in “there is no – interest which is not used”, 39%, “although used, since it is hard to read, it does not use” by a negative choice 19%, It became a form which “it does not use since there is no work to read, although used” calls 16%, and “it does not use since it is high rather than he buys a comic” calls 7%. Replies have gathered for the choice after being based on experience which the choice about a price was seldom chosen but used also here. In the company, it is analyzing as “It seems that sense of incongruity is memorized to the way peculiar to a portable comic of showing.”
In the question which asked the used reason, “I wanted to read a nostalgic work” occupied 41%, and “I wanted to read a new work” occupied 32%. Moreover, about the circumstances accessed to the electronic comic site, “the advertisement of a banner or an e-zine to access” had become 58%, and “the search engine sites of the cellular phone” were most replies in investigation of the access method to the portable site announced in KLab in “June. The user who clicks and visits banner advertising during the inspection of other sites is presupposing that I can hear many things.”
“1 to 315 yen” becomes 34%, “only a part for no charge is read” becomes 32%, “316 to 525 yen” has become 16%, and the electronic comic related amount disbursed for one month concludes “There are few heavy users” in this investigation.
Otherwise, will take a run at this fluff piece from USAToday once we get the sand out of our shoes 😉