Year: <span>2005</span>
Year: 2005

Year: 2005

TTPCom and NEC Collaborate to Develop Dual-mode 3G/2G Chips

TTP Communications and NEC Electronics Corporation, the leader in single-mode (W-CDMA) 3G baseband chips in Japan, today announce that they are joining forces to develop dual-mode chips that will include TTPCom Limited’s EDGE/GPRS/GSM silicon and software architecture. This fast-track route to the development of 3G/2G chips will help NEC Electronics increase its presence in the global market. NEC Electronics is developing a dual-mode 3G/2G chipset to address the growing world market for dual-mode wireless products that can handover to EDGE/GPRS/GSM networks outside pockets of 3G coverage.

Underwhelmed by DoCoMo's Next-Gen premini

DoCoMo’s first premini mobile was a tiny (90mm) stripped-down, no-frills 2G phone weighing a feather-weight 69 grams. Just out is its successor, the bigger and juicer premini-II, redesigned with a 1.3-megapixel camera, enhanced music elements, bar-code reader and memory stick. While the premini nicely occupied an open niche in Japan’s mobile ecosystem (as a second celly to use where cam phones aren’t allowed), it’s difficult to see what need the more full-featured premini-II fulfills. Manufactured by Sony Ericsson, the premini-II is slim, polished, weighs 79 grams, has 1.9-inch QVGA screen and comes in three colors: silver, black and brown. Given its beefier size (105 mm), it should probably have been called the pre-midi.

NetGear's 108-Mbps Wireless in Japan

NETGEAR announced their new line of MIMO G wireless products based on the True MIMO(TM) chipset from Airgo Networks. Available in Japan this month, the MIMO G Wireless Router (Model WGM124) and PC Card (Model WGM511) provide customers with the highest-performing wireless networking technology on the market with up to 8x the speed and coverage of standard 802.11g devices. “Whether in the home office, family room, or back yard, customers will enjoy a smooth, consistent connection,” said Naoki Hayashida, Japan Country Manager.

Fujitsu Enables Prolonged Viewing of Digital Broadcasts to Mobile Phones

Fujitsu Limited today announced the development of a low-power analog to-digital (AD) converter that employs a delta-sigma(*1) modulator for mobile phones that are capable of receiving digital terrestrial television and radio broadcasts(*2). The new delta-sigma modulator-based AD converter can reduce power consumption levels of tuners embedded in mobile phones to 30 milliwatts (mW), approximately one-sixth to one-third the power drain of current levels, thereby enabling prolonged viewing of terrestrial digital broadcasting on mobile phones by significantly lessening the power consumption of mobile phone batteries. In addition, the integration of the new AD converter with OFDM demodulator (*3) onto a single chip is expected to facilitate the development of mobile phones that are more compact than currently available.

ACCESS NetFront Browser: 150 mn Deployments Worldwide

ACCESS announced that its market leading NetFront(tm) browser has surpassed 150 million deployments worldwide. Widely recognized as one of the most advanced Internet browsers in the world, NetFront now also stands as the most widely deployed and actively used browser in the beyond-PC market, which includes mobile phones, PDAs, Digital Televisions, set-top boxes, digital televisions, automobile telematics, game consoles, Internet kiosks, email terminals, and many other Internet devices.

KDDI Posts January Subs Data

KDDI has posted their January subscriber data on the company’s IR website. CDMA 1X subscribers grew by 286,000; cdmaOne shrank by 122,300. Assuming a 100 percent migration rate, this indicates that the carrier picked up 163,700 new customers. It will be interesting to see how the other two compare when the official TCA numbers come out later this week.

Vodafone: Changes to Executive Structure

Vodafone K.K. announces that at today’s Board of Directors Meeting it has decided on changes to its executive structure. William (Bill) T. Morrow, the current Chief Executive of Vodafone UK, will be appointed Representative Executive Officer and President effective 1 April. The current Vodafone K.K. President, Shiro Tsuda, will take on the responsibilities of Executive Chairman while continuing as a Representative Executive Officer, and will also become Chairman of the Board on 1 April. David Jones will complete his term as COO on 31 March.

WWJ Newsletter: Latest Issue

On Friday, Yahoo Asia News carried an interesting Kyodo story on mobile spam in Japan. According to the report, Japanese mobilers are being swamped with junk email despite all-out efforts by the cellcos to eliminate the nuisance. Much of the spam (meiwaku) mail advertises adult web sites and is sent in bulk to millions of mobiles from regular spam servers — that’s the, uhmmm, beauty of Japan’s reliance on Net-standard email rather than SMS for mobile messaging.

The latest edition of the WWJ email newsletter is available online here.

NTT Posts Solid 9 Month Results

Reuters is reporting that Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. (NTT), the world’s biggest telecoms group by revenue, posted a solid operating profit for the first nine months of its business year, despite intense competition. While the group’s fixed-line business may be struggling, the mobile arm is doing rather well, thank you very much.

Matsushita Profit Rises 47%

Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., the world’s largest consumer-electronics maker, said third-quarter profit rose 47 percent on lower costs and flat-screen television sales. The company will cut 7,000 to 8,000 jobs in Japan in its components and mobile phone units by March 31, it said. Matsushita Electric has 340,000 employees, more than double Sony’s, according to Bloomberg data.