Hate to say we told you so – but we did – in the ‘Japan Wireless 2004 Preview’ WWJ video interview with IDC’s Mitch Kimura. Shipments by Japanese mobile phone makers in January dropped 22.3% from a year earlier to 2.98 million phones and were also well down on December’s 4.71 million units, the Japan Electronics and Information Technology Industries Association said in a monthly report yesterday.
Seiko Epson Corporation and Renesas Technology Corporation have jointly developed standard specifications for the Mobile Video Interface, a high-speed serial interface designed specifically for text and graphics displayed on mobile communications devices. Now that they have completed the new standard, the two companies have decided to make it an open standard. Epson and Renesas Technology believe that the dissemination of the new standard will ensure even simpler architecture for the high-speed data transmissions required of next-generation mobile equipment such as mobile phones.
With some 270 million mobile subscribers, China is now the world’s largest mobile market. Faced with long waits and high fees for land-line installation, many Chinese consumers naturally opted for cellular service instead: mobile subscriber numbers surged to pass fixed-line users last year. Personal Handyphone System (PHS) that had been tried, without much success, in Japan was retooled for the Chinese market by an obscure US-based company called UTStarcom (Nasdaq: UTSI) and rechristened “Personal Access System” (PAS).
It’s a terrifyingly simple idea. “We thought, what if you could stick legs on a keitai?” says TMSUK’s Tokyo Research Center Director Shin Furukawa. They did, and the result ain’t a cutesy Aibo or a nearly singing and faintly swinging Sony entertainment ‘bot, but boy is it practical. Here appears to be the world’s first fully functional, walking, talking home security robot Banryu or “Guard Dragon,” using a DoCoMo FOMA for its eyes and ears.It’s on sale now in Japan for JPY 1.98 million, or about $18,000. We think you’ll agree, this story really does have legs! Full Program Run-time 10:52
Omron Corporation will establish a design center tentatively named the Hong Kong Design Center in Hong Kong Science Park (Pak Shek Kok, Shatin, New Territories, Hong Kong, http://www.hkstp.org/) to handle LCD backlight design and development. Initially it will concentrate on design/development of compact size backlights for mobile phones aimed at the China and Taiwan markets. Omron plans to begin operation of the design center from July 1, 2004 with a 10-person structure utilizing locally hired employees. Omron also plans to prepare a design/development framework positioned as a design center in FY 2005 for large size television backlights aimed at the China and Taiwan markets.
KDDI and Okinawa Cellular Telephone are pleased to announce an addition to their new high-speed 3G mobile handset lineup. The new A5504T by Toshiba, available from mid-April, is the first handset to merge BluetoothTM with BREWTM applications, and comes with a mega pixel camera, web-authoring software, multi-media output functionality, EZNavi Walk compatiblity, and data transmission speeds of up to 144kbps.
