DoCoMo will seek to revitalise lacklustre sales of its FOMA service with the launch of three new handsets. From next month DoCoMo will start receiving an estimated 6m 3G handsets from NEC, Panasonic and Fujitsu in a bid to increase its 3G customer base to 10.6m. In conjunction with the new handsets, DoCoMo has earmarked Y120bn ($1.1bn) of tariff cuts during the current financial year.
Before all you Die Hard gamers on a post E3 convention rush get too excited, note we put quotes on “Next-Generation…” because this one is recommended for the age-6-and-up crowd. Also, to those business/suit types who are about to click away and search for “ARPU” and “Wi-Fi,” you might want to pause and read between the lines. OK, onto the skinny… Bandai have recently launched this very cool — a la Japanese style — clamshell handset to an eager young target market. In fact the handset was the must-have item during Japan’s recent Golden Week shopping spree… think Tickle-Me-Elmo-type hysteria. The “Card Commun” unit retails for about US$30 and features an onboard swipe function for the collectable character card-series based on Toei Animation’s popular Sunday morning cartoon show “Precure.” Simply put, this is like Pokemon and Tamagochi combimorphed, with a cycle or two of steroids tossed in! What really struck us was that while of course there is no voice function — or monthly call charges — it does have a P2P sync feature built in so kids can share content by joining their handsets together.
Japan’s leading parking lot operator Park 24 has announced the launch of an experiment designed to test a FeliCa-based cashless payment solution at its Times 24-hour metered parking lots. The experiment, to last through August 15, supports the N504iC and SO504iC. Park 24 currently has 5,225 parking sites with a total of 81,364 parking spaces across Japan.
In an intervew with Nikkei BP, NTT DoCoMo’s new president Masao Nakamura has said he has three major goals; increase 3G FOMA subscribers, dig out new revenue sources such as mobile e-commerce and enhance customer satisfaction. After posting its highest ever operating profit of 1, 103 billion yen in the year to March 2004, it certainly looks as if Nakamura has his work cut out for him, especially as — on the surface of it at least — KDDI au seems to have consistently knocked the socks off DoCoMo in terms of gleaning 3G subs.
Yesterday, the Wireless Watch Japan site was slammed by record traffic after we posted our first big Net news scoop: Casio’s announcement of what appears to be the world’s first 3-megapixel camera phone, due for release later this summer via KDDI. And that wasn’t the only big Japan handset news from the past few days: both KDDI (working with Hitachi) and NTT DoCoMo have announced concept models capable of receiving terrestrial digital TV broadcasts, while Vodafone’s been mentioned as working on new karaoke-enabled handsets with Sharp and Toshiba. Phones in Japan have become culturally connected communicators and terminal makers who think more like artists and less like engineers will flourish.
Japan’s mobile phone shipments for fiscal 2003 approached the record high. The Japan Electronics and Information Technology Industries Association (JEITA) has announced that the total number of shipments for fiscal year 2004 (Apr. ’03 to Mar. ’04) reached 49,843,000 units, following two years of consecutive growth.
