Japanese Phone Firm Sees Export Market in Older Users

Rather than competing with dominant brands like Samsung and Apple in the mainstream smartphone market, Fujitsu is aiming at a niche — older consumers, who, the company says, are not always served adequately by products like Apple’s iPhone or the Samsung Galaxy series.

In partnership with Orange, formerly France Télécom, Fujitsu has started selling a smartphone in France that uses a technology called Raku-Raku, or “easy easy.”

The Raku-Raku handset has a touch screen and provides on-the-go Internet access, but it has larger buttons and other features aimed at older people who sometimes struggle with the complexity of conventional smartphones.

“We believe the smartphone provides benefits to these customers,” said Toru Mizumoto, the director of the mobile product division at Fujitsu.

In partnership with NTT DoCoMo, the leading mobile network operator in Japan, Fujitsu has sold 20 million Raku-Raku phones in Japan since it introduced them in 2001. Ten million of them remain in active use more than a decade later. While most of these phones are old-fashioned feature phones, Fujitsu and DoCoMo introduced the first Raku-Raku smartphone in Japan last year.

Japanese manufacturers tend to focus on the domestic market, introducing features that are considered innovative here but considered quirky and less appealing elsewhere.

While aging consumers may be a niche market, they present a growing opportunity in most industrialized countries. In Japan, 39 percent of the population will be 65 or older in 2050, up from 23 percent in 2010, according to the Statistics Bureau of Japan. In France, the 65-and-older cohort will grow to 25 percent in 2050 from 17 percent in 2010, data from the United Nations show.

“If you’re a smaller vendor and maybe haven’t had much of a presence in Europe, it makes sense to look at these kinds of niches,” said André Malm, an analyst at Berg Insight, a research firm in Gothenberg, Sweden. “It’s an underserved market.”

The 65-and-up population may be growing, but 65-year-olds are becoming younger, too — at least in terms of their affinity for technology. Those who will retire in 2020 or 2030 are active on Facebook or Twitter now.

“We see that there is a big, big part of the senior population that is willing to go for a smartphone,” said Augustin Becquet, the head of Orange’s device portfolio.

While the elders of tomorrow may be increasingly comfortable with technology, their physical dexterity may deteriorate with age, as it has with past generations. That is where the Raku-Raku smartphone, called the Fujitsu Stylistic S01, comes in.

At first glance, the S01 looks like a fairly ordinary smartphone. The features aimed at pleasing old people could just as easily be annoying. The touch-screen “buttons” on the phone’s calling function, for example, require a firmer push than those on ordinary smartphones. Only after a slight vibration do they register the chosen digit. That way, the phone avoids misdialing.

Another Fujitsu technology appears to slow down the speech of the person on the receiving end of a Raku-Raku call by removing the gaps between words and allotting more time to the actual sounds. The screen is brighter than those on ordinary smartphones, making it easier to read under direct sunlight.

There are also safety features, like a button on the phone that sends a text message to a friend or family member with the GPS coordinates of the phone’s owner in case of emergency. In its shops, Orange is providing special training on how to use the phones.

“The younger generation likes the stuff with the latest technology, but every smartphone vendor is going to have to adapt to an aging population,” Mr. Becquet said.

While Fujitsu and DoCoMo were pioneers in the development of phones for older people, they are not the only players in the field. Two European companies, Emporia Telecom in Austria and Doro in Sweden, have also been actively pursuing older users.

Doro introduced its first phone aimed at that market in 2008 and has sold four million of them since then. In the Nordic countries, 15 percent of the 65-and-older population uses Doro phones, said Jérôme Arnaud, the chief executive of the company.

While most of the Doro phones in use are old-fashioned handsets, the company introduced a basic smartphone last December and plans to roll out a more sophisticated model this autumn, Mr. Arnaud said.

The phone will use a simplified version of the Android mobile operating system, and several dozen applications have been customized for it, he added. These include a video e-mail function that lets older people skip the typing.

As for Orange and Fujitsu, the companies say they view the partnership in France as a pilot project; if the Stylistic phone catches on, they say, it will also be offered in other European markets in which Orange operates, like Britain.

“For Japanese vendors, it has been challenging to go abroad,” said Michito Kimura, an analyst at the research firm IDC, “but this technology does meet a demand.”

Bits Blog: Facebook Adjusts Its News Feed to Bump Up Older Posts

The New Old Age Blog: Online Habits Coming Slowly to Older Adults

Older adults hit a digital milestone last year: For the first time since the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project began conducting surveys, a majority (53 percent) of people over age 65 used the Internet. The proportion has since inched upward, to 54 percent.

Which certainly represents progress. When Pew first began tracking Internet use in 2000, only 13 percent of seniors were online. But it remains a fairly anemic number compared to the rest of the adult population, more than 80 percent of whom use the Internet.

And among the older old, those over age 77, only about a third are online. Yet that’s the cohort most likely to become isolated by physical limitations, poor transportation and the loss of social connections — the group, in other words, who might particularly benefit from being able to interact with the world digitally, for everything from banking and ordering groceries to e-mailing faraway friends.

I wonder, too, how much satisfaction we can really take in the growth of wired seniors, as Pew used to call them. Back in 2000, more than 40 percent of the group just behind them, those aged 50 to 64, were online. So maybe we haven’t made as much progress as it appears. Maybe, 13 years later, the people online just got older.

Laurie Orlov, a tech industry analyst who writes the Aging in Place Technology Watch blog, has been fuming about this particular digital divide for years. “It matters more than ever,” she told me. “Organizations keep thinking they’ll save a buck by no longer using paper.”

When it comes to government programs, financial and insurance statements, health information or discount coupons, “the assumption is that you’re online.”

Even simple tasks like finding phone numbers for local businesses may soon require Web access. How long will there be print yellow pages? How long will there be movie listings in print newspapers? For that matter, how long will there be print newspapers? Without Internet access, older people could feel even more cut off than many already do.

A number of programs have tried to address this disparity, but they tend to be small-scale and local.

A few years ago, I wrote about a “virtual senior center”: a nonprofit organization acquired computers for about a dozen low-income New York City seniors, provided instruction, then linked their users to discussions at an actual senior center in Queens. A worthy demonstration project, but three years later it still has fewer than 100 participants.

Or take the company called It’s Never 2 Late, which has placed its simplified touch-screen computer systems in 1,200 nursing homes and assisted-living communities, plus some adult day programs. Another good idea with a “but”: most seniors don’t live in congregate settings.

AARP last year started a $169-a-year subscription service that gives its members unlimited phone, online or in-store access to Best Buy’s Geek Squad agents, who can help them choose, install, use and repair electronics.

I hear enough muttering from boomers whose parents call whenever they encounter a computer glitch to think turning over this job to the Geek Squad might be a smart move, but it doesn’t seem like one that can bring large numbers of low-income seniors onto the Internet.

“We want faster adoption,” Ms. Orlov said. “Little efforts start up here and there, but it’s not a national effort to get 100 percent of seniors online.”

She’s convinced, by the way, that older people can make the leap (as many readers here are about to point out, I know) and that most will want to. “With some of the devices available today, if a person is open and interested and there’s something on there that’s worth the trouble — like video of family members or the ability to Skype with family — they can learn to use a computer or a tablet,” she said.

Money will be the big obstacle, of course. As Ms. Orlov points out, it’s going to take big national organizations with deep pockets — foundations, technology corporations, Internet providers and cell carriers, AARP — to undertake a bigger, faster and more effective effort than our current piecemeal approach.

But it may take less than we would have thought a decade back, because tablets are cheaper than most desktops and laptops. And tablet ownership is growing among seniors, Pew reports. Just within 2012, the proportion of the over-65 population with a tablet climbed to 15 percent from 8 percent. Among those over age 77, tablet ownership jumped to 12 percent from 3 percent.

This might be the way. Other ideas are welcomed.

Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”

Disposal of Older Monitors Leaves a Hazardous Trail

The crumbling cardboard boxes, stacked in teetering rows, 9 feet high and 14 feet deep, were so sprawling that the inspectors needed cellphones to keep track of each other. The layer of broken glass on the floor and the lead-laden dust in the air was so thick that the inspectors soon left over safety concerns. Weeks later, the owner of the recycling company disappeared, abandoning the waste, and leaving behind a toxic hazard and a costly cleanup for the state and the warehouse’s owner.

As recently as a few years ago, broken monitors and televisions like those piled in the warehouse were being recycled profitably. The big, glassy funnels inside these machines — known as cathode ray tubes, or CRTs — were melted down and turned into new ones.

But flat-screen technology has made those monitors and televisions obsolete, decimating the demand for the recycled tube glass used in them and creating what industry experts call a “glass tsunami” as stockpiles of the useless material accumulate across the country.

The predicament has highlighted how small changes in the marketplace can suddenly transform a product into a liability and demonstrates the difficulties that federal and state environmental regulators face in keeping up with these rapid shifts.

“Lots of smaller recyclers are in over their heads, and the risk that they might abandon their stockpiles is very real,” said Jason Linnell of the Electronics Recycling Coordination Clearinghouse, an organization that represents state environmental regulators, electronics manufacturers and recyclers. In February, the group sent a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency asking for immediate help dealing with the rapidly growing stockpiles of the glass, much of which contains lead.

With so few buyers of the leaded glass from the old monitors and televisions, recyclers have collected payments from states and electronics companies to get rid of the old machines. A small number of recyclers have developed new technology for cleaning the lead from the tube glass, but the bulk of this waste is being stored, sent to landfills or smelters, or disposed of in other ways that experts say are environmentally destructive.

In 2004, recyclers were paid more than $200 a ton to provide glass from these monitors for use in new cathode ray tubes. The same companies now have to pay more than $200 a ton to get anyone to take the glass off their hands.

So instead of recycling the waste, many recyclers have been storing millions of the monitors in warehouses, according to industry officials and experts. The practice is sometimes illegal since there are federal limits on how long a company can house the tubes, which are environmentally dangerous. Each one can include up to eight pounds of lead.

The scrap metal industry estimates that the amount of electronic waste has more than doubled in the past five years.

A little over a decade ago, there were at least 12 plants in the United States and 13 more worldwide that were taking these old televisions and monitors and using the cathode ray tube glass to produce new tubes. But now, there are only two plants in India doing this work.

In 2009, after television broadcasters turned off their analog signals nationwide in favor of digital, millions of people threw away their old televisions and replaced them with sleeker flat-screen models. Since then, thousands of pounds of old televisions and other electronic waste have been surreptitiously unloaded at landfills in Nevada and Ohio and on roadsides in California and Maine.

Most experts say that the larger solution to the growing electronic waste problem is for technology companies to design products that last longer, use fewer toxic components and are more easily recycled. Much of the industry, however, seems to be heading in the opposite direction.

Cathode ray tubes have been largely replaced by flat panels that use fluorescent lights with highly toxic mercury in them, said Jim Puckett, director of Basel Action Network, an environmental advocacy group. Used panel screens from LCD televisions and monitors, for example, do not have much recycling value, so many recyclers are sending them to landfills.