February update: Japan mobile operator market shares

TCA published its February mobile subscriber numbers for Japan's mobile phone operators. The main points are as follows:

• Japan's mobile population grew by 0.4% from last month reaching 115,686, 400 contracts
• Among all mobile contracts, 96.4% go to cellular phones, with the rest allocated to PHS phones (Willcom)
• Overall cellular operators added 488K subscriptions with DoCoMo being slightly ahead of the pack with 148K adds
• In terms of total subscriber bases, DoCoMo grabs 50% of the market followed by KDDI au (28.3%), Softbank (19.7%) and eMobile (2%)
• Data plan subscriptions account now for 83.1% of total cellular phone market with DoCoMo being above the average with 87.5% of its subscribers using data services
• 3G penetration stands at 96.6% for overall cellular market with Softbank having 97.5% of its subscribers shifted to 3G devices
• Japan cellular market is dominantly postpaid with only 1.2% being still on prepaid; DoCoMo is left with just 0.1% of prepaid accounts

Mobile social gaming's awareness high in Japan but few users agree to pay

A recent user survey of more than three thousand respondents in Japan by CA Mobile and Spire revealed interesting trends about the uptake of mobile social gaming on such sites as mixi, mobage town and gree. Here are some highlights:

• Awareness of mobile social gaming is very high with close to 70% of respondents indicating they have played some kind of game
• Spread of word is the most effective way to get new players onboard with more than 60% of those who played a social game citing friend's invite as a reason to join
• The most popular time for playing social games is just before going to bed (or actually playing when already in bed)
• Almost 60% of respondents spend no more than 20 minutes per access
• Majority of users plays free games, with only 4.2% of core users expressing willigness to pay

Source: Spire

Brother debuts a 9.7-inch e-paper reader

Brother came out with an e-paper reader that uses a low-power thin 9.7-inch electrophoretic gray-scale display. With 15mm of width and 600g of weight the device spots Bluetooth to display documents from mobile phones or PDAs on its bigger screen. It also has an SD memory card slot. The battery is said to last for up to 83 hours - an equivalent of 5,000 read pages. It is good for carrying product manuals or other documentation. It is compatible with Brother scanners allowing direct scan of documents. The problem is that it uses a proprietary viewer format technology.

Source: Brother

Answering your door phone system from a cell phone

Meeting the needs of growing population of households with both spouses working (55% of all households in Japan) Panasonic developed a door phone system connected to mobile phones. The system delivers both audio and color video streams to mobile phone's screen whenever there is somebody ringing your bell door. Panasonic plans to start sales from June 2010. The price tag, including door phone system and mobile phone adapter will be set at JPY114,450.

Source: Panasonic

Quiz: How much of gold can be found in 500K handsets?

Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has just finished its cell phone recycle campaign across the country reporting 567,056 mobile phone units collected. The ministry also published some interesting stats about precious metals contained in the colected lot of retired phones. If properly extracted, about 22 kilograms of gold, 79 kilograms of silver, 5,670 kilograms of copper, and 2 kilograms of rare palladium can be recycled. Now, it doesn't say anything about the extraction costs but nevertheless, these are some impressive numbers.


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