Apple controls 72% of Japanese smartphone market

Of course, there's NOTHING that's worth even a brief consideration other than the iPhone. No proper Android phones. Not even Palm (heh). NTT and their ilk will try to make a lame-ass closed touchscreen phone and fail, I laugh at their pathetic existence. Muhahaha!

Exactly. Docomo softbank and au. Bad original article.

The problem with stories like this is people make the assumption that that 72% applies to the entire Japanese market. However generally there are 35-45 million phones shipped in Japan every year, so that 1.69 million iPhones realistically amounts to 3-5% of the Japanese market. However it seems to be the popular trend to apply the arbitrary moniker of "smartphone" (which is such a stupid categorization IMO) to narrow the scope down to phones that analysts seem to agree run smartphone operating systems.

It's important to note that the reason why the iPhone has such high penetration numbers is due to Softbank's extremely aggressive marketing, i.e. a good deal of them have literally been given away. So of the 72%, I have to wonder how many were actually purchased (many received theirs for free, with a 2 year contract).

Perhaps its also worth noting that Softbank has a worse image, if not more so, than AT&T here in America, with the worst customer service imaginable.

72% smartphone market share but only 5% of total mobile market share in Japan as although most Japanese mobiles are pretty smart, they are not defined as smartphones: http://bit.ly/bIXwfE

Like saying iPhone has 100% iPhone OS market share.

Sorry, you've mis-translated the Business Week data.

Apple captured 72% of the market IN 2009. That means 72% of the 2009 sales were captured by iPhone. IPhone sales in 2008 and prior were zero percent, while in prior years other smart phones were being sold. You'd have to divide the 1.69m iPhone sales into the TOTAL in-use number of smartphones to see what the total iPhone presence in Japan is...

Can't wait for China to explode!!!!!

But there's potential trouble ahead, from the same Businessweek article:

"Android, a newcomer to the smartphone operating-system market, will see its global handset base jump to 68 million units by 2013, from 690,000 in 2008, researcher IDC Corp. said in January. Google software will outpace Apple’s and Microsoft Corp.’s operating systems to be second only to Symbian, used by Nokia Oyj."

Remember how nobody in Japan was going to buy an iPhone because the Japanese cell phone market was so advanced already?