Japanese people usually get their hands on cutting-edge technology before anyone else. But many of them don’t make much use of the latest in mobile phone hardware, a recent study has found.

The survey questioned almost 15,000 Japanese folk about which phone features they use most frequently. It found that 84 per cent of handset users ranked their phone’s camera as the most frequently used application, closely followed by the calculator and the alarm clock.

Only around 50 per cent of respondents had ever used a mobile phone to read a barcode or transfer information over infrared, whilst only around 18 per cent had ever used GPS services on their handsets.

On a positive note, over 70 per cent of people had at least used the multimedia functions on their handsets, such as a digital TV tuner, an FM radio, or music and video playback. However, memory cards were still only used by around 30 per cent of those questioned.

Japanese people don’t all want to live life in the fast lane either. Around 47 per cent said they were satisfied with the speed at which their mobile phones display information, update the screen and respond to button pushes. Only 2.9 per cent of people were very dissatisfied.