KDDI has announced an agreement with Toshiba Corporation and Hitachi Limited to cooperate on research into the next generation of batteries for mobile communication devices such as mobile telephone handsets. The objective of the research is to develop a compact fuel-cell battery that can be used in mobile phones by the end of 2005.
Vodafone Holdings today said its 1QFY04 consolidated operating revenue plunged 21.4 percent compared with the same quarter last year; the figure feel to 356.0 billion yen due mainly to the exclusion of the fixed-line telecommunication business in the second half of fiscal 2003. Total revenue for the mobile business declined by 6 percent compared to the same quarter last year.
Are they ahead, or behind the curve. WWJ has great coverage coming up of the future showing KDDI au/ Hitachi’s W11-based digital TV tuner concept keitai at Wireless Japan 2004 in action. For the present, however, Vodafone continues to press on with analog TV tuners, and massive TV advertizing. The latest offering is Sharp’s V402SH, which will be on sale tomorrow, armed with a swivel screen that allows punters to watch TV (reception willing) even when the phone is closed. The V402SH comes with a 2.2-inch QVGA (240 x 320 pixel) LCD screen and a 1.3 megapixel CCD camera. Happy viewing! [.pdf here]
Launches of the Japanese mobile media platform stalled elsewhere in Europe. But France’s Bouygues Telecom successfully duplicated the Japanese wireless carrier’s development and marketing strategies — right down to the last pixel.
UPDATE 2: The Feature has “sort of” come clean, admitting their original story that DoCoMo was going to “drop i-mode” was utter rubbish. Of course, we smelt a rat as soon as the story, written by someone poorly translating a Japanese source, flashed around tech pages, as noted from the text following this update…”This story sounds a little fishy to us, since the reference to a Nikkei Shimbun story came from Total Telecom via Techdirt we’ve done some quick fact checks and seems that perhaps its a translation issue and/or a mis-understanding of terms.”
While it is true that DoCoMo is beginning to push migration of 2G (PDC) users to their 3G (W-CDMA) network, that has nothing to do with the i-mode service itself. Most telling is that NE AsiaBP who run the english side of Nikkei have no mention of what would be perhaps one of the most significant stories coming out of Tokyo this month.
UPDATE FINAL: We asked for clarification from DoCoMo PR and will set the record straight. “There is definitely no plan to end the i-mode brand in Japan,” according to the company’s Masanori Goto Saturday on July 24 at 16:00 JST.
This free-for-all program takes you to KDDI’s recent launch event at the Imperial hotel announcing the carrier’s three new WIN handsets, all now making use of Macromedia Flash lite. You’ll get a close-up of these phones in action plus tips on the new 3G flat-rate price plan coming in August. We also highlight NTT DoCoMo’s N900iL dual-mode 802.11b/W-CDMA handset based on the FOMA N900i which, unfortunately, has been transformed into the de facto proprietary, intranet-only “Passage Duple” WLAN phone by NEC and DoCoMo. While future versions may run on the consumer-targeted M-Stage platform, for now this first baby step into the dual-mode 3G/Wi-Fi world is aimed exclusively at corporate-controlled walled gardens.
