FeliCa Handset Launch on July 10
FeliCa Handset Launch on July 10

FeliCa Handset Launch on July 10

FeliCa Handset Launch on July 10

DoCoMo has tossed its FeliCa chips on the table, and they’ll probably end up a winning number. In a press release today, Big D revealed that they are releasing their, and the world’s, first i-mode FeliCa Service smart-card handset on a (Gasp! Huff! Huge Disappointment!! Not 3G!!) mova P506iC 2G phone, on 10 July 2004. WWJ video of the 506i event here.

While it may not be a 3G celly, the P506iC isn’t quite a bog-standard, 2G has-been of a phone. It will, for example, pack a 360-degree rotatable LCD display (bim!), including a wide-angle viewfinder/display at 90 degrees (bam!), and telephone calling, emailing, and i-moding may all be performed while the phone is closed (adjust saddle!) says DoCoMo in today’s electronic handout.

The P506iC is also Big D’s first model to feature a strobe light for shooting in the dark, as well as flesh-tone color correction for naturally beautiful images.

We’ll refrain from comment on that one!

Apart from fresh flesh tones, the camera packs an almost-2 megapixel CCD camera, spec’d at 1.95 megapixels (recorded resolution of 1.92 megapixels) and 20x digital zoom, to be more precise.

Another bell (or whistle?) is what the carrier is calling its “Photococktail” function. (For a minute, we were thinking that DoCoMo’s keitai had truly revolutionary functions; the ability to stir cocktails, for example.) Photococktail allows users to combine audio with up to 10 still images at a time (taken with the built-in camera) for editing and viewing as movie clips.

Well that’s all for the good. But what we want to see is FeliCa… on 3G!

— The Editors