Smartphone ownership in Japan increased 43% in the first half of this year, with one in four mobile consumer owning a smartphone, representing 23.5 percent of the entire mobile population.

Home-grown brands are popular, with Japanese handset manufacturers as top five brands, revealed comScore MobiLens service. Sharp ranked as the top phone maker with 22.6%, of market share, followed by Panasonic (13.6%), Fujitsu (11.8%), NEC (8.9%) and Sony (7.9%). – See chart below.

The survey, which polled 4,000 mobile owners, showed Android as the leading smartphone platform with 64.1 market share, up 1.9% in March. Apple ranked second (32%) with Microsoft coming in third (3.2%). – See chart below.

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The most popular use of phones by Japanese mobile owners was taking photos (61.1%). About 54.7% of the respondents used applications, 46.9% sent text messages while 29.9 % accessed search during June. – See chart below.