According to Teruo Katsura, Managing Director and Member of the Board of Panasonic Mobile Communications Co. Ltd, (PMC), Panasonic is targeting a1 trillion yen, in sales and 40 million handset production schedule for 2006, and is aiming at an 8% global market share in terms of terminal shipments by 2006. Speaking at a strategic briefing today, Katsura said that PMC wants to boost its sales 250% of its 2003 levels and hit GSM hard in Asia in particular.
Today, Teruo Katsura and Panasonic Mobile Communications announced something we’ve been lusting for over two years: A Japanese maker with brilliant technology showing the true grit to attack the world market!
We were fiddling around with Panasonic’s new FOMA 900i-series phone (not at a store near you in Europe or the United States, unfortunately) and noticed the plastic battery cover kept on falling off. At that moment, Katsura-san, managing director and member of the board of Panasonic Mobile Communications Co. Ltd. (PMC) – who we were rubbing shoulders with – turned around and said “Don’t Worry! These are only the test models!” We had a great chat with Katsura-san, who earlier today announced Panasonic’s aggressive move into GSM, Europe, Asia and the world; but that, the X700, the X60, and X66 are for later in this article. Having handled the P900i, we think it’s a cracker. It’s sleek and light and full of action, a folding design that’s beautiful in its simplicity and feather-light to touch (Oh! So far has FOMA come…!) but packing a full 3G punch – plus an SD card that plugs into a whole range of Matsushita/Panasonic equipment for what the marketing guys used to call a “richer multimedia environment.” Heavyweight congratulations to Panasonic for delivering a killer 3G phone!
The best news we have is that, aside from our love at first sight with Panasonic’s 900i, the model is alive and well and officially on sale mamonaku (soon). Of course, that could mean anytime from today, Feb. 10, to the next 10 days, although for probity’s sake, Totaro Uchiyama, manager of PMC’s Overseas Mobile Terminal Division, says the launch will be before the end of February.
In 1973 Martin Cooper, the inventor of the first portable handset, was the first person to make a call on a cell phone (from Motorola to arch-rival Bell.) Now he’s Chairman of ArrayComm, which has developed its iBurst Personal Broadband System based on adaptive array antenna technology. According to the company, iBurst allows mega-bit-per-second cellular bandwidth with much better efficiency than anything extant 3G systems can provide. In today’s exclusive WWJ interview, Cooper argues that 4G is already here; launches broadsides at carriers, engineers, and handset makers who have yet to fulfill the promise of wireless phones; and charges that, after “years of hype,” the industry has failed to deliver on 3G. He also relates his vision for the mobile space: “The Internet will engender thousands of different [mobile] applications.” This interview is a WWJ Classic. Full Program Run-time 17:38
With the latest Telecommunications Carriers Association (TCA) figures in for January, the success of DoCoMo’s new 900i series looks like the best hope for the company to overturn four months of KDDI dominance in picking up subscribers. TCA figures for Jan. 31 2004 indicate that KDDI again proved overwhelmingly popular, with the company picking up 500,100 CDMA 2001x subscribers (against a loss of 268,100 CDMAOne subs) against FOMA’s 132,600 increase and Vodafone’s 11,100 W-CDMA subs.
Providing the rocket doesn’t blow up, Mobile Broadcasting Corp. here, and SK Telecom in Korea should start a 70-channel satellite-to-mobile S-Band (2.6GHz) broadcasting service this June. We sort of wrote this company off last year, but Samsung’s announcement that it is developing a cell phone for the service has peaked our interest a little.
Last December, DoCoMo unveiled its new 900i series phones in a splashy press conference at Tokyo’s Imperial hotel, and today, Friday Feb. 6, the first of that series, the Fujitsu F900i, hit the shops. The 900is, which Takeshi Natsuno calls “The best 3G phones in the world,” are ace when compared with the original FOMA phones. The 900is have 3X standby time (480 hours) and weigh 20% less than FOMA’s first models. In other words, the 900is are as good as DoCoMo’s 2G PDC terminals! The new Symbian OS based Fujitsu distinguishes itself with a finger print sensor and, like the other 900i models, a huge (100k) flash bucket. As you sit back and enjoy this video preview to our upcoming program of that launch event, note that DoCoMo is not saying when the other fab 4 are coming out.. yet. Full Program Run-time 2:55
DoCoMo had a decent 3Q, posting net income of 137.8 billion yen ($1.31 billion) for the three months to Dec. 31, while net income for the nine months this fiscal year hit 494.2 billion yen and sales 3.83 trillion yen, the company said today. But the most remarkable trend, as we’ve been pointing out recently, is for the world’s second biggest cellular operator to lose the ever-toughening subscriber race for Japan’s bread-and-butter, but essential PDC subscriber base. Is this really part of the DoCoMo strategy, or are people getting fed up (gasp! shock!) with Ai Kato? But, with an eye to FOMA’s future, the company also raised its somewhat cautious subscriber projection for the 3G service 20% to 2.4 million by March 31 this year.
Nearly the tonic the company needed? Vodafone K.K. is reported to be lauching a new dual mode megapixel camera-bearing 3G handset, the V801SH by Sharp this April. Does that mean the technical issues that stalled rollout last October are sorted? Could be! The .pdf press release from Vodafone is
We guessed right!. DoCoMo’s fantastic FOMA 900i series start rolling into the shops, beginning with the fabulous Fujitsu, on this coming Friday. DoCoMo has just released the info. officially today in the following press release. Also note that we have some great video coverage of the December launch press conference unveiling the 900i handsets coming up later in the month.
Read all about it Here guys and geeks- that’s a x100 market expansion thanks to the wonderful world (gaming environment) of wireless phones. iSuppli analyst Jay Strivatsa says that while mobile gaming has not to date been taken seriously, the advent of 3D graphics and 10,000 polygon/sec drawing capabilities of new phones such as Mitsubishi’s D505i and our fave, the Sharp J-SH53– performance that’s already double that of GameBoy Advance — are going to help push the mobile phone gaming market to $3.5 billion in 2007 from $300 million last year. That’s according to the company’s Consumer Electronics Market: A Disruptive Year Ahead in 2004.
