Year: <span>2004</span>
Year: 2004

Year: 2004

SK Telecom Selects Gemplus' USIM Card for 3G

Gemplus International S.A., the world’s leading provider of smart card based solutions, today announced its selection by SK Telecom, the leading provider of mobile telecommunications in Korea, to deliver USIM card technology for the commercial launch of its 3G W-CDMA network. The Gemplus "GemXplore 3G" USIM cards deployed for SK Telecom support all three primary networks currently available: 3G W-CDMA, CDMA 2000 1X and GSM. They also support WIM (Wireless Internet Module) as an additional security feature for WAP based mobile commerce transactions and the VSDC (VISA Smart Debit Credit) application by VISA International for the world’s first mobile proximity payment service on USIM card, MONETA.

Beyond 3G Networks with Lucent Mobility

Lucent has deployed more than 90,000 spread-spectrum base stations and has enabled more than 50,000 base stations in networks worldwide to support 3G CDMA2000 services, far more than any other equipment vendor. They have also deployed commercial 3G networks for more than 25 mobile operators in North and South America, Europe, Asia and the Australia and New Zealand region. An interesting interview with Lucent Mobility CTO Paul Mankiewich.

NEC 3G FOMA 900i Launches Feb. 22

The model that many customers have been waiting for, NEC’s version of the 900i, are to go on sale on Feb. 22, NEC and DoCoMo said today. Meanwhile, DoCoMo has said it’s going to show FOMA off at the 3GSM World Congress 2004 in France next week with a direct link to Japan. Excitement is growing about the 900i series, with informal impressions collected by WWJ, plus hard evidence that we’ve heard from InfoPLANT indicating that NEC’s 900i could be a smash hit.

DoCoMo Comments on Cingular Acquisition

WWJ has …so far…refrained from the comment on the AT&T Wireless dealdizmo, the value of which seems to have crept about a billion a day, up to $35b over the last week, according to media speculation. Mmm. The Japanese press has pronounced that DoCoMo has confirmed that it wasnot bidding (and had no intention of getting involved in) any deal about who, what and when was going to suck up the losses and deal with the huge potential with AT&T Wireless Services. Well, we say, ?Quel surprise!” For us, the whole episode was the non-story of the month as regards DoCoMo, because there was no way Keiji Tachikawa was going to put ANY money on the line to prop up AT&T; after the losses DoCoMo got saddled with when its last foreign mobile lebensraum went south. So now AT&T has been Cingulared, it’s time for DoCoMo to cash in its chips.

Vodafone KK: J-Phone Not Lost in Translation?

Those watching this week’s video program will get to see what a howler Bow-Lingual is on Vodafone’s new V610SH handset from Sharp. We are just itching to find out if the same inventive and creative genius that seemed to permeate the old J-Phone can re-establish itself in 2004 at Vodafone KK. A recent study shows that, as we suspected, the Japanese public is going gangbusters for TV mobile phones. Having developed Japan’s first TV celly, the former J-Phone Corps have proven, yet again, they were ahead of the curve in understanding what customers want. But it is also apparent that Vodafone KK will need more than highly entertaining doggy gimmicks if it is to stop losing market share to KDDI and DoCoMo’s 3G services.

Bow-Lingual – A Cell Phone for Fido

Bow-Lingual - A Cell Phone for FidoWe jumped at the chance to take the new Bow-Lingual Connect software for wireless ‘walkies’ recently. Takara, makers of the popular canine speech translator, had a dog to lend us, but it fell ill. Then a friendly ballerina’s French Bulldog pulled out at the last minute, so we conducted this highly unscientific test on Vodafone’s V601SH handset by Sharp using our own pre-recorded (with Movie Sha-Mail) video of a since-deceased beagle. We may have been barking up the wrong tree with this approach, or howling mad to try to make sense of Bow-Lingual, but even if Takara’s mobile version is a bit beastly, it shouldn’t distract from the unit itself, which is a jolly good cell phone. Full Program Run-time 11:38

Cell Phone Users Want TV Function

Nepro Japan published results of a survey of mobile phone users about services and functions. According to the survey, the most wanted function is a TV, as about 40% of the respondents pointed to it. In response to a question regarding “functions desirable for future mobile phones” (multiple answers allowed), “TV” (43%), “dictionaries” (35%) and “keys” (29%) were the top three. Functions such as “electronic wallet” (25%) and “TV phone” (24%) did not attract many supporters.

Panasonic Ships CCD-Killing Tech for Mobiles

With what might turn out to be impeccable timing, Matsushita Electric Industrial is shipping what Panasonic is touting as a breakthrough technology called nuMAICOVICON to replace CCD and conventional CMOS for camera loaded mobile phones. Imagine a technology that’s as cheap and cheerful on power consumption as CMOS, but delivers CCD quality, add in a good chuck of production and the Panasonic people could have a product that will save quite a few purchasing managers’ careers. This isn’t a future technology story: Panasonic are deadly serious. They have already started banging out about 2.2 million of the 1.3 megapixel version now, are adding a 2 megapixel version next month and want to ramp to 8 million units a month by October! WOW!

Siemens, Huawei Sign 3G Joint Venture

Shenzhen Huawei Technology Co. Ltd., one of China’s leading telecom equipment manufacturers, and Siemens Mobile signed a contract Thursday to build a joint-venture to develop products based on the TD-SCDMA standard. Over 100 million US dollars will be injected into the project. Siemens will hold a 51 percent stake and Huawei 49 percent.

Mazda Adopts G-BOOK for Telematics

Mazda and Toyota today announced that they have reached a basic agreement on providing Mazda owners with G-BOOK, a Toyota-developed network information service. Mazda aims to introduce this service from 2005. Toyota began providing the G-BOOK service to Daihatsu Motor Co. Ltd. last August and has already announced similar agreements with Fuji Heavy Industries Ltd. and Mitsubishi Motors Corporation.