ROBODEX 2003, a four-day exhibition featuring various robots, was held at the Pacifico Yokohama in Yokohama April 3-6. The robots on display included pet robots, ASIMO and other human-shaped robots, and some others with different purposes. Many robots were seen with various capabilities for doing household chores.
More than one million users signed up for 3G mobile phone services in March in Japan, helped largely by surging 3G subscribers from KDDI, according to Japanﾕs Telecommunications Carriers Association (TCA). KDDI, Japanﾕs second-largest mobile phone service provider, added about 914,100 3G subscribers.
A man abruptly stabbed a female worker at her construction office here after asking to borrow the telephone, leaving her in serious condition, police said.
NTT DoCoMo said on Friday it plans to launch a flat-rate wireless Web access service using its personal handyphone system (PHS) network, in a bid to shore up its flagging PHS operation. NTT DoCoMo said on Friday it plans to launch a flat-rate wireless Web access service using its personal handyphone system (PHS) network, in a bid to shore up its flagging PHS operation.
An Internet service firm has been ordered to fork out over 6.5 million yen to cell phone operator NTT DoCoMo after it sent millions of e-mails to nonexistent addresses, inflicting expenses on the operator. Ruling that NTT DoCoMo had suffered losses because of the mass e-mailing, the Tokyo District Court on Tuesday ordered the unidentified Internet service firm to pay 6.56 million yen in compensation.
Fellow Canadian and keen Japan wireless observer Sean Bennett asked a question last week that should be thunderingly obvious to anyone watching this market: have a question regarding NTT DoCoMo’s M-Zone – do you know how this differs/compares to NTT Communication’s Hotspot WiFi [WLAN] service? The pricing is similar, though one charges higher sign-up fees while the other has higher monthly fees…
Satoshi Nagao, executive managing officer of KDDI, said: “We are already in an era of one mobile phone per person, so the market itself is saturated. To make the company grow in such a situation we have to increase our share of the market, by making other companies’ customers shift to us.”
The SD Card Association, a group of about 500 firms dedicated to the promotion of SD Memory Cards, on March 13 announced a new mini version of the cards. The smaller SD Memory Card, which has about 60% less capacity than current cards, will be used mainly in mobile phones for recording image data. Association member Toshiba Corp will market a version with a 32MB recording capacity in June and another with a 64MB capacity in July.
Went to Machida on Saturday to buy a 256-MB SDRAM memory module to replace the original one that has long plagued my PC with crashes and other devilry (3900 yen, for those that are interested). Sofmap was selling the new SD Card-format mobile data cards for DDI Pocket’s PHS network for 17,800 yen – a little pricey for something that is so small it can be lost in a blink.
I received a nice plastic bag with a brochure and a pack of tissues (standard Tokyo street-level marketing fare) from a young lady in Ginza last week. The packet flogs DoCoMo’s “M-Zone” WLAN service, and the brochure prominently displayed a map showing where you can access the (recently expanded) system around Tokyo station (13 locales, including Tokyo International Forum). Time for Big D to play catch up to Yahoo! Mobile?
