Year: <span>2006</span>
Year: 2006

Year: 2006

Sony Ericsson's Blazing Handsets

Sporting a 3.2-megapixel sensor, Sony Ericsson’s new K800i joins an exclusive club of high-res camera phones due out in Europe in 2006. Nearly identical to the K800i, the K790i will be a slightly less expensive alternative which omits 3G and video calling from the raft of available features, settling for tri-band GSM with EDGE for semi-high speed data. Making the leap from spinners and sliders to clamshell, the W300i is Sony Ericsson’s first clamshell Walkman phone, sharing the vast majority of its feature set with the spinner form factor W550i. A quad-band GSM handset with EDGE, the W300i includes the Walkman music player and comes bundled with a 256 MB card.

Vodafone K.K. Press Conference Blitz

This afternoon’s press conference at the swank Roppongi Hills Hilton saw Vodafone Japan putting on a brave face during a difficult news day for the global company. With five separate product announcements – links after the jump – and a good presentation from Ota-san, the famous director of their claimed-world-first photo-mail service, it will take us a day or so to sort through everything and file a more detailed story. While the 904SH handset with Sharp’s new VGA screen will get most of the main-scream headlines, some of the other things we saw were much more interesting… for better and worse (WWJ subscribers login for a peek at Vodafone’s concept TV phone that was also on hand without much fanfare).

Unseen Perils of Mobile-Phone Use

Opening her daughter’s monthly cell phone bill, the woman’s jaw goes slack with astonishment. Three million yen (approx. $26,000 usd). This is surely a mistake, she thinks. Why, my daughter wasn’t even in Japan for most of that time. “The figure is correct,” confirms a staff member of the carrier company, in a no-nonsense tone. “You are obliged to pay.” This state of affairs, explains Yomiuri Weekly, came about when her daughter’s cell phone was stolen during an overseas trip. Ironically, this particular phone could only be used to make calls in Japan. (Theft like this underscore the increasing amounts of personal data & cash carried on phones in Japan. The point here is that even if the phone itself won’t work overseas, the UIM card will, once transferred to a compatible GSM/WCDMA phone outside Japan — and many Japanese, unfamiliar with GSM-era SIM cards and PIN codes — don’t password-protect their UIM cards. — Eds.)

First Content for Vodafone live! CAST

Vodafone K.K. today announced the launch of content for Vodafone live! CAST, an automatic content delivery service scheduled to begin with the mid-March 2006 roll out of two new compatible 3G handsets, the Vodafone 904T by Toshiba and the Vodafone 804N by NEC. The visual mobile magazine “yubio” will debut as the first available content offering. “AkibaRun!” and “chu*rara” are scheduled to follow later in March. Yubio (based on a play on words using the Japanese word for thumb, which is oya-yubi) is a visual mobile magazine that readers can quickly flick through with their thumbs and targeted at males from 25 to 35 years of age. Yubio aims to be a visually oriented all-round entertainment magazine with set themes for each day of the week. Each issue, delivered daily, will have approximately 15 pages. (More details after the jump.)

DoCoMo Achieves 4G Field Trial

NTT DoCoMo, Inc. announced today that it achieved 2.5Gbps packet transmission in the downlink while moving at 20km/h. The fourth-generation (4G) radio access field experiment took place in Yokosuka, Kanagawa Prefecture on December 14, 2005. DoCoMo achieved a maximum 1Gbps speed in a similar field experiment on May 9, 2005. This time, by increasing the number of MIMO*1 transmission antennas from four to six and by using 64-QAM*2, data volume per transmission was increased from four bits to six bits. As a result, DoCoMo achieved a maximum speed of 2.5Gbps, which is faster than the International Telecommunication Union Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R)’s proposed standard.

JR's Cell Phone Payment Plan: Slow Start

East Japan Railway Co.’s new service that allows passengers to pay train fares with their cellphones has got off to a slow start. The number of compatible handsets is limited by JR East’s strict standards on scanning accuracy, designed to prevent accidents during rush hours. Cellphone carriers also blame limited geographical coverage and a JR East requirement for passengers to own the company’s View Card credit card. (Hmmmm… the credit card requirement could be a show-stopper. Give it 90 days… — Eds.)

DNS as Mobile Phone Number

Just as every human being has a name, every computer is identified by a unique IP address. While humans are intelligent enough to distinguish two people with the same name, computers aren’t so clever. Computer IP addresses have to be unique. Luckily, domain names make it easier to remember popular Web addresses; after all, Internet searches would be very difficult if you had to remember unique IP numbers, which can run between 4 and 12 digits long. But even though domain names are widely used on the Internet, they are still an unexplored topic on mobile phones. In this article, I propose implementing DNS on mobile phones to simplify calls and service transfers.

Panasonic Starts Delivery of P901iTV

Panasonic Mobile Communications today announced it has begun shipment of P901iTV mobile handsets to NTT DoCoMo. The P901iTV is DoCoMo’s first mobile handset to receive terrestrial digital broadcasting signals in addition to conventional analog signals. The handset was created in response to the planned launch of mobile digital broadcasting in April 2006. The handset’s main display is a 2.5-inch wide-view LCD screen. Approximately 3 hours of continuous digital TV viewing is possible.