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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?
Nintendo 3DS to get Recochoku music streaming and download service in Japan, launches in December
Today's early Nintendo Direct broadcast didn't have much in the way of new hardware pricing or surprises, but it did reveal a new music service for 3DS users in Japan. The handheld will soon be able to stream, download and play music from Recochoku, a mobile-centric site that specializes in ringtones and track downloads. Users should be able to take their pick from over 1 million titles, priced at around 250 yen. Any songs bought on your 3DS can also be transferred to your (compatible) keitai of choice.
iPhone was Japan's best-selling smartphone in 2011, Android more than comfy as well
It's deemed likely that Apple had the top-selling cellphone in Japan this past fall, but how did it do in all of 2011? Quite well, if you go by MMRI's estimates. The iPhone had 30 percent (almost 7.3 million) of the Land of the Rising Sun's 24.2 million sales among individual smartphone labels, or nearly double Sharp's 17.5 percent. Don't think that Android-powered smartphones like the Aquos SH-12C didn't make an impact, though: virtually every other smartphone in Japan, 69 percent, was running some flavor of Google's mobile OS. Apple managed to shake up a sometimes insular overall keitai market as well, having come just short of Fujitsu for the top spot in all cellphones. Researchers are expecting the smartphone space in Japan to grow by a healthy 15 percent in 2012, although it's still a wildcard as to whether or not KDDI's iPhone support will keep Apple riding high for another year.
