Small Fish, Big Pond

Besides the “Google phone” and the Iranian Twitter hack it seems that the iPhone sales news in Japan is blowing up all over the place.

The news is that iPhone now makes up 46% of the Japanese smartphone market.

This sounds amazing considering that Japan is so phone centric that Apple could dominate the market in just a couple years. The problem is that the sample was only taken by what Impress considers “smartphones.” The ubiquitous Japanese keitai that EVERYBODY in Japan has wasn’t factored in.

So really the article heading should be that the iPhone makes up 46% of 5% of the Japanese phone market, hardly a market dominator.

“But it’s 46% of smartphones, not Dumbphones.” Keep in mind that the “Dumbphones” that weren’t included in the above percentage have features such as:
-Mobile Web
-Email
-REAL Cameras
-Turn by Turn GPS directions
-2D Barcode scanning
-RFID payment systems
-2 way video calling
-HDTV receivers
-SMS
-MMS (the iPhone still doesn’t have that!)

In reality it should be the other way around, the iPhone has 46% of the dumbphone market. But that’s nothing to blow off, it means it’s got a good chunk of the market over Windows mobile, Android, Palm, and RIM. Pretty decent. But instead of looking at these skewed numbers lets look at the big picture.

46% of the smartphone market is 3 million phones. Pretty good for a year an a half.

But as of 2 weeks ago there are 110 million phones in Japan.

That means the iPhone makes up 2.7 of the phones in Japan. If you gather 50 random phone users in Japan ONE of them will have an iPhone.

This is really just another case of not seeing the forest for the trees; a problem that is common if you’re deeply entrenched in the tech news world (to be fair not all blogs got hung up on the 46%). For all the news we hear about the iPhone it’s only been out (in the US) for a couple years. Most non-tech people hold onto their for long than that so as rabidly popular the iPhone is it’s still not a market dominator.

The same thing happened yesterday when news came out that iPhone had just recently passed Windows Mobile in the number of smartphones in use. People were amazed that this hadn’t happened a year ago. It’s not shocking at all, RIM and Windows Mobile (and quickly Android) are on many handsets and all carriers. Plus RIM and WM have been on sale for more than twice as long as the iPhone. Joe Wilcox has a good breakdown of that data.

So as in most things before you freak out when somebody put out amazing numbers like “It’s over 46(9000)%!!!” take it with a grain of salt and look at it from the perspective the average person and not the tech blog angle.