iPhone in Japan turns into TV tuner

Now you can't blame iPhone in Japan for not being capable of oneseg TV reception, a must-have feature for Japanese phones. Softbank is shipping a stand-alone oneseg & battery hardware box that will serve as a TV tuner and battery for iPhone. It can send over the TV signal to iPhone using the WiFi connection or be connected to iPhone via a cable when used as an extra battery. It sells for around 100 dollars. Additionally, users will need to download a free oneseg app from App Store in order to watch oneseg TV.

Handset replacement cycle to get longer in Japan

Market researchers at MM Research Institute in Japan found out that almost half of domestic cell phone users intend keeping their current handset for a little over two years, which will lead to the longer replacement cycle and, therefore, will depress handset manufacturers' sales. On average, only one out of three users will buy a new handset within a year.

Source: MMRI

Blogs and social networks are popular among Japanese mobile phone users

Survey takers at Impress R&D discovered that over 28 percent of respondents in Japan access blogs only from mobile phones. At the same time, over 15 percent of users access social networks using cell phones as their mere tools. 

Source: Impress R&D

Forecast for multiple wireless subscriptions in Japan

While the proportion of Japan’s population using mobile phones has slowly reached around 80% and the prospects of further organic growth are bleak, the country’s industry players hope that the next growth will happen in the secondary mobile phone line ownership market. The trend of buying second or even third subscriptions is abundant in Europe where prepaid contracts are commonplace. Can Japan hope for the same rapid growth in multiple wireless contract ownerships? The answer is not likely since the prepaid contracts are banned here. However, some growth can be expected thanks to mainly enterprises buying phones for their employees. According to ROA Group’s forecast, almost 15 million mobile phones in 2008 can be attributed to a second-phone category. And this number should go way beyond 25 million by 2012. Japan’s unique case is that in most cases the users will actually get a new device, not just an additional SIM card to insert into their existing phone.

Source: ROA Group

Japan's cell phone reality: 398Kbps in download speeds

In reality you can get as much as 398Kbps in average download speed on your cell phone in Japan. This conclusion is made by Impress R&D after they tested about twenty thousand cases. They simply asked users of three national carriers to access a Flash-based site with a speed measuring counter. After they gathered enough data, the average download speed stood at 398Kbps. Assuming the handsets measured were all 3G devices these are meager results. 398Kbps is about what you are supposed to get for uplink (at least with DoCoMo's advertised FOMA HSDPA) while downlink should be in a range of several megabits per second. Well, we all know that in theory it should be perfect...

Source: Impress R&D via Nikkei Trendy