Hal O'Brien

When it has something to do with Apple.

The New York Times has a blog piece on the iPad's arrival in Japan, and the stir it's allegedly causing. They use this as a peg for a larger analysis about the Japanese feeling like they've lost their competitive edge, not only to Apple, but to South Korea's Samsung, Taiwan's Acer, etc.

Along the way, they drop an eyebrow raising stat:

"Shipments of the iPhone more than doubled, to 1.69 million units, in the year ended in March, giving Apple a 72 percent share of the country’s smartphone market, according to the MM Research Institute."

Eyebrow raising enough that I went looking at it. There are a few problems.

The most obvious: Note the 72% figure is of "smartphone" sales. The thing is, smartphones don't sell well in Japan (or anywhere else). The iPhone's actual market share in Japan among all cell phones is 4.9%, according to the very same report from MM Research Institute Ltd. quoted for the 72% figure.

Now, mind you, that is slightly better than the iPhone's global market share among cell phones -- which is 3 percent in Q1 2010. (Smartphones sold 54.7 mil units; they're 18.8% of global sales; that yields global sales among total devices of 290.96 mil units; of which Apple sold 8.8 mil.)

Around the world, 97% of the market looks at the iPhone -- and buys something else. In Japan, "only" 95% of all customers buy something else, but it still ain't great.

The iPhone has a smaller market share than Linux. And Steve Jobs has yet to trade in his "reality distortion field" for a "reality clarification field."