We guessed right!. DoCoMo’s fantastic FOMA 900i series start rolling into the shops, beginning with the fabulous Fujitsu, on this coming Friday. DoCoMo has just released the info. officially today in the following press release. Also note that we have some great video coverage of the December launch press conference unveiling the 900i handsets coming up later in the month.
Read all about it Here guys and geeks- that’s a x100 market expansion thanks to the wonderful world (gaming environment) of wireless phones. iSuppli analyst Jay Strivatsa says that while mobile gaming has not to date been taken seriously, the advent of 3D graphics and 10,000 polygon/sec drawing capabilities of new phones such as Mitsubishi’s D505i and our fave, the Sharp J-SH53– performance that’s already double that of GameBoy Advance — are going to help push the mobile phone gaming market to $3.5 billion in 2007 from $300 million last year. That’s according to the company’s Consumer Electronics Market: A Disruptive Year Ahead in 2004.
Surprise! NEC’s new card mobile phone is just going on sale in the China market. Japan’s number one cellie maker certainly appears to be spreading its wings in China these days, even if, or perhaps because things aren’t looking too pretty at the moment in the UK.
As mentioned in previous stories and our recent video report, Sony and DoCoMo have been busy setting up FeliCa Networks Inc. to develop the companies’ mobile FeliCa IC that will, we think, lead to the massive expansion of the mobile phone as a do-all contactless payment device. Sony announced today that it has firmed up the FeliCa Networks company organization with Takeshi Natsuno (“Mr. i-mode”) as one of the directors.
“We know what kind of contents sell, we know what the customers want and we can create a great user experience for the users on the networks,” says Playboy.com’s VP of Global Licensing, Markus Grindel, talking to Wireless Watch Japan in Part 2 of our exclusive video coverage from the 3G Mobile Forum 2004. With adult content helping kick-start and then drive the VHS and DVD revolutions, estimates of a $4-7 billion market for this content category in the wireless space in 2006 don’t seem far-fetched at all. But a number of roadblocks, including carrier technologies, billing and DRM pose significant hurdles as well. “Right now its very hard for me to determine if someone receives an image from us if that image is being sent to someone else. How old is that person.. I don’t know, and that’s a key factor to figure out,” says Grindel. Full Program Run-time 12:47
We finally filmed the introduction to our latest video program – outside an establishment called “Sexual Harassment Corporation” – one of four or five adult industry vendors, including a brothel and a “Love Hotel” in a side street off the main drag, where prostitutes jump out and routinely proposition drunk salarimen (and the happily married author). There isn’t a station on the Yamanote line that isn’t crowded by similar scenes, and there there’s hardly a carriage on the JR line that doesn’t have, shall we say, full-blown advertisements for adult mags and manga that show Japanese girls seemingly as young as 14 flirting and flaunting themselves. Let’s face it, sex sells in Japan. Which brings us to wonder why Playboy.com is being blocked from the official Mobinet space.
