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Explaining Japan's feature phone fetish
The world's biggest mobile tech show has just finished. You were probably poring over all those new big-screened smartphones, but you still remember what came before those all-screen oblongs, right? When was the last time you saw a flip phone being used? Not a Nokia clamshell buried away in a drawer, or a Motorola RAZR dusted off by an older relative who charges it once a month, but in a train station, at a bar -- in public. For me, it was a few hours ago. I live in Japan (Hi!), and people here still carry a torch for the feature phone -- or at least, their version of it, the gara-kei, short for Galapagos keitai. ("Galapagos" refers to Japan's curious tech ecosystem that gave birth to devices that only seemed to appeal to its home country. Oh, and keitai means phone.) Last year, shipments of feature phones increased, while smartphone figures fell. Experts said this was more a one-last-hurrah boom than a new trend, but still, over 10 million of these simpler phones shipped in 2014. How are these phones clinging on in the face of obviously superior hardware and functionality? And who's still buying them?
Japan's flip-phone love affair continues, smartphone shipments fall
In an alternate universe where up is down and black is white, more feature phones get shipped year-on-year while its replacement, the smartphone, sees sales stall. That's apparently what happened in Japan last year though, according to MM Research Institute. For the first time in seven years, flip-phone shipments grew -- and grew by 5.7 percent to a hard-to-comprehend 10.58 million units. In the same year, smartphones units shipped fell 5.3 percent, down to 27.7 million. Flip-phones still make up a surprisingly large proportion of phone sales in Japan and it's actually the second year in a row that the market research firm has noted a drop in smart device sales. MM Research's Hideaki Yokota told Reuters: "Smartphones are also peaking in terms of functionality and they tend to last a long time as well, so there are fewer renewals."
Japan: the country where flip-phones refuse to die
The buttons are easier to type on, the battery lasts longer, it's familiar. No, we're not talking about BlackBerry this time, but the Japanese feature phone. Glorious, folding forefather to the smartphone, and the form-factor that gave birth to gara-kei, a shorthand phrase for "Galapagos phones". It's a negative term pointing to devices that simply wouldn't survive outside of Japan. However, it's not stopped the country's biggest carrier, NTT Docomo, from revealing two new feature phone models (and a refreshed paint job for an older phone) just last week. Our Engadget Japanese colleagues were told by Docomo's spokesman that these phones are still so popular with some customers that they practically sell themselves -- many still enter their stores looking for a new flip-phone, not a smartphone.
