US & Japanese Mobile Activity Compared

This represents a comparison of comScore's MobiLens data for the US market released September 15, 2010 and data for the Japanese market released September 22, 2010. The areas of major difference in behavior are 1) text messaging, which is a relatively recent phenomenon in Japan, where e-mail is the preferred form of mobile-to-mobile communication (54% usage); and 2) browser usage, which has been popular in Japan for over a decade and for a long time was more widely used than the online internet (it may still be). In terms of app usage, the gap is closing very quickly and I suspect we'll see parity sometime next year. One stat from the Japanese market, that's interesting (and not on this spreadsheet, because I don't have an apples to apples comparison) is mobile video consumption. Apparently 22% of Japanese mobile users watched TV and/or video on their mobile phones... which has to be substantially higher than in the US, where I believe usage is under 10% (a little help?).

Year of Pain Indeed | comScore: Smartphone Transition Sees 13% US Mobile Gamer Decline

That said... there is light at end the of the tunnel. “Although the number of mobile gamers has declined in the past year, there is reason for significant optimism about the future of this market,” said Mark Donovan, comScore SVP Mobile and senior analyst. “As the market transitions from feature phones to smartphones, the dynamics of gameplay are also shifting towards a higher quality experience. As a result, we can expect to see a profound increase in adoption of this activity, both in terms of audience size and overall engagement.”

This report basically codifies the trend a lot of us have been observing in the mobile games market... that the carrier deck, feature phone business is declining at a faster pace (in terms of overall audience and business in the short term) than the promising/exciting smartphone business has the ability to offset. I think, ultimately, we'll see the development of a smaller, more active, more satisfied, customer base with a higher propensity to consume games... who will create a bigger market. I've always believed that there were a lot of barely engaged users out there being counted as gamers, who'd accidentally play preloaded Tetris on their RAZRs every couple of months. Of course, the competition for these higher quality customers is far more intense than it ever was in the feature phone world and the price points are lower (with no carrier subscription models), so as y'all said in my poll last month, this will be a year of pain for many publishers. For those that haven't adapted well to the new smartphone paradigm... pain will only be the beginning of your worries.

Read comScore's entire release here.

More Americans Like The Mobile Web More Often

comScore released some numbers about mobile web usage in the US today. Unfortunately you don't get a good picture of overall mobile web usage from this survey, rather you get some understanding of behaviors within specific segments of the mobile internet. For instance it looks like 63.2mil Americans accessed news & info sites (like CNN) at least once in Jan 2009 via their mobile browsers...and 22.4mil did it daily (daily use increased over 100% from a year ago period). Social Networking mobile sites (Facebook, MySpace, etc.) saw a huge jump in daily usage (guilty!)...up 427% from Jan 2008, with 9.3mil daily users. I'm convinced this trend is being driven by the increased popularity of smartphones with full QWERTY keyboards, good browsers (that make it easy for users to browse beyond the carrier deck), big screens and unlimited data plans.

2 More Reasons For iPhone To Dominate Industry & Consumer Mindshare

1) Information Week is reporting this morning that Apple is planning video conferencing applications for the iPhone. Cool...if this is true it'll be like Japan 4 years ago! Wonder what the monthly tariff from AT&T will be on that service?

2) Consumer adoption of the iPhone and other smartphones (one of my TREND WATCH items) is apparently behind a 17% increase in downloads of mobile games in 2008 according a ComScore release last Friday. The iPhone accounted for a whopping 14% of all mobile games downloads in November 2008 with 32.4% of iPhone users having claimed to have downloaded at least one mobile game in that month...which is pretty impressive since the average across all device users is still a paltry 3.8% in a month.