Japanese phone users remain pragmatic

Japan.Internet.com and Cross Marketing conducted a survey of Japanese cellphone users, asking about the optional handset features they use most of all.

Without any surprise, email came first, with 98% of respondents sending and receiving emails via a cell phone. The camera’s second place was easily predictable and reasonable (62%), taking into the account the mass penetration of camera phones in Japan. However, the third place was occupied by a trivial and very pragmatic feature of the alarm clock (61.7%), followed by similarly pragmatic calculator (45.3%) and calendar (33.3%). Surprisingly, the heavily promoted features like MP3 player and mobile TV were lagging behind.