iPhone Has 46% of Japanese Smartphone Market 214
MBCook writes "Despite claims earlier in the year that the iPhone was hated by Japanese consumers (later disproved), the iPhone has been doing well in the land of the rising sun and the evidence is in. Apple has taken 46% of the Japanese smartphone market, cutting in half the once 27% market share of the previous lead, Advance Sharp W-Zero3 (Japanese site). The article includes a large chart of the market share of Japanese smartphones over the last 3 years."
Where's the beef, er iPhones... (Score:5, Informative)
You gotta wonder what those numbers actually mean. Are we just talking about being a big fish in a miniscule pond? My own personal observations don't correspond to the idea that a "Apple has a 46% share". They certainly don't seem terribly visible for "such a large share".
Re:Math Skill - there appears to be no app for tha (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe read the article? The 3G has 24.6% of the market. The 3GS has 21.5% of the market. That adds up to roughly 46%. The most popular phone in 2008 was the Sharp WillCOM W-Zero 3 Advance, and it held a 26.8% absolute market share. That is now 14.6%, meaning that the other smart phones share roughly 40% of the market.
Of course the article doesn't clearly define what 'market' that is.
Re:Remember when smartphone meant something? (Score:3, Informative)
Better Article at Engadget Mobile (Score:5, Informative)
Engadget Mobile provides a better perspective:
iPhone nabs 46 pecent of Japanese smartphone market, the tiny Japanese smartphone market
So you read a headline like "iPhone grabs 46 percent of the Japanese smartphone market" and the first thing you're likely to think is, "wow, Apple is really doing well for itself." Well, it is and it isn't. While it has made some considerable gains in the smartphone market at the expense of phones like Sharp's W-ZERO3 and the Willcom 03, it still hasn't gained nearly the same total mindshare or market share that it has over here. That's because "smartphones" as we know them are still a relatively small market in Japan, where carriers' lineups consist of a whole range of offerings including everything from mobile TV-equipped phones to true camera phones to perfume holders.
Source [engadget.com]
Re:Where's the beef, er iPhones... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Better Article at Engadget Mobile (Score:5, Informative)
I spent a week in Tokyo back in November. When I was there, I saw 2 iPhones in the wild. Both were owned by the Americans I was traveling with. That is also 2 more than the number of Blackberries I noticed (besides the one I have).
Everyone there has these flip phones with these really tall screens that rotate 90 degrees to "landscape" mode (they also watch TV on them).
So yeah, US style "smartphones" are not really used. They use these mutant flip phones instead.
Re:Where's the beef, er iPhones... (Score:1, Informative)
The key term is "Smartphone", where Smartphone is determined by whoever wants to determine it for whatever purpose. 46% of the Smartphone market in Japan is still realistically only about 10 million units in a population of 120 million phone savvy users, and even 10 mill would be a push.
Bear in mind that around at most 40 million iPhones have been sold to date and at least half of these have been in the US but more realistically probably around 25 million if sales have managed to remain proportionate over the last year or so. America is Apple's real success story, because it was a neglected market for cell phones as they were years behind in cell phone tech compared to Europe and Japan so Apple did the smart thing and gave a market what it wanted. Despite hype like this article from pro-Apple sources, the iPhone is still only doing quite averagely in Europe and even then when it's shown to be "doing well" it's generally with false comparisons- for example, comparisons of the iPhone usually include the iPhone, the iPhone 3G and the iPhone 3GS all as one phone, whilst splitting competitors, such as say Nokia's, N95 and N96 phones which are no less different into separate handsets for statistical purposes then doing comparisons.
As phones go, when you split the iPhone more fairly into it's different handsets it's really not all that different to most other major handsets through the years- 10 to 15 mill units per version has been pretty much par for the course for all Nokia's high end phones for the last 5 - 10 years in fact.