Year: <span>2003</span>
Year: 2003

Year: 2003

J-Phone Announces Global Rental

J-PHONE Co., Ltd., to be renamed Vodafone K.K. tomorrow, announced today that on October 1 it will launch Vodafone Global Rental, a mobile handset rental service for visitors to Japan. With this offering, visitors who come to Japan either on business or pleasure can now enjoy the same communication services that they do at home. Vodafone Global Rental is not just a mobile handset rental service for visitors toJapan-customers of overseas mobile operators who have roaming agreements with J-PHONE(currently 110 operators in 79 countries and areas) can enjoy voice, SMS and packetroaming in Japan by simply inserting their GSM SIM card into a 3G rental handset, a firstin the Japanese market.

Matsushita Develops 3-D Sound Reproduction Technology for Mobile Devices

Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. (hereafter referred to as MEI), best known for its Panasonic brand of consumer electronics and digital communication products, has announced today that it has developed the “Hypersurround Sound System” (HSS), a high-fidelity surround sound reproduction technology that will enable reproduction of three-dimensional sound fields on compact / mobile electronic equipment, and requiring only a small computational load and low power consumption.

3G Phones Attract Attention at CeBIT

NEC set up a large booth of 200 square meters that is closest to the entrance and exhibited only mobile phones. The demonstration of 3G mobile phones attracted attention from visitors. The company exhibited two models supporting both W-CDMA and GSM that it markets in foreign countries, including Great Britain and Australia.

Sony Ericsson 3G Handset Delayed

Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications AB has pushed back the launch of its first 3G mobile broadband phone in Europe and Asia by several weeks to early January as the Japanese-Swedish joint venture continues interoperability tests with wireless operators. The Z1010 will support 2G GSM and GPRS technologies, as well as the new 3G mobile broadband networks based on WCDMA technology.

Area Information Service to be Tested

DoCoMo announced today that its R-Click Service, a new area-information service incorporating i-mode mobile phones and a “wireless tag” device, will be tested by Mori Building Co. Ltd. at the Roppongi Hills complex in Tokyo. The test will be conducted from November 1, 2003 to February 1, 2004. Individuals participating in the test will each receive a wireless tag transmitter, called a Radio Frequency ID (RFID) tag. Approximately 4,500 RFID tags will be distributed for the test.