A recent report by the folks at the CIAJ, one of Japan's most respected telco industry associations and who I'll be seeing next week in Tokyo, picked up the latest trends in Japan mobile use. Notable trends showed 1 in 2 Japanese using the mobile web daily, mobile TV usage booming to more than 1 in 4, and daily usage of GPS/map-based services nearly doubling over the last 12 months to nearly 1 in 5 users.
Quite a few losers since last year's report including mobile ringtone use (54% to 46%), wallpapers (35% to 30%), digital music (20% to 19%), infrared (18% to 14%), videophone (9% to 3%), and push-to-talk (5% to 3%).
Bluetooth usage bucked the trend with an amazing jump from 2% to 10%, so the manufacturers must have finally got their act together and be offering something substantial across the handset spectrum. The reason they haven't so far must be having people in EU/US shrugging their collective shoulders, but it's one of those things like why 2D barcodes are not widely available on phones over in Europe... maybe they never got round to it.
Daily usage of mobile digital cash services (ie. Oyster card-like services using a built-in chip on your phone instead of a card) also increased 33% to 1 in 5 users, as people use their phones to pay for goods in corner stores and Japan Rail-affiliated commercial centers, where you can buy your wares before heading home by touching your phone in and out at the checkout.
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