Year: <span>2005</span>
Year: 2005

Year: 2005

BREW Runs Robot via Bluetooth

KDDI started New Year with a bang yesterday, with three seperate press releases; they announced over 1 million full-song downloads (already!) and something about OTA (over-the-air) updates which we can’t quite make out. However the one about their new BREW-based, Bluetooth-controlled robot [ .jpg ] looked pretty interesting. It seems that Robot Labs has a 29-cm tall, 2-legged beast that weighs in at about 950 grams. Available in early February for about 198,000 yen, it [ .pdf ] has servo motors and gyro sensors — so it’s got to be cool — and will respond to various movement commands (“kick,” “punch”) issued from the cell-phone appli via bluetooth.. Wow!

Hitachi Beats Samsung at KDDI – Comments

In a report on Unstrung, Justin Springham comments on the significance of this week’s KDDI contract awards to Korean and Japanese vendors (noted by WWJ here). Yesterday, Hitachi seemed to beat Samsung’s day-earlier deal with KDDI Corp., revealing that it had also secured a CDMA 1XEV-DO Revision-A network upgrade deal with the carrier worth approximately 100 billion yen. Springham writes that: “Hitachi’s win eclipses the earlier $800 million deal with Samsung. Reports suggested Samsung claimed to be the sole supplier of Revision A kit to KDDI.”

Fujitsu Partners to Offer All-CMOS Single-Chip Wireless USB

Fujitsu Limited and Staccato Communications, Inc. announced a partnership under which they will provide all-CMOS, single-chip wireless universal serial bus (USB) and ultra-wideband (UWB) solutions for the global marketplace. CMOS single-chip wireless USB products are compliant with Multiband OFDM Alliance (MBOA) UWB specifications. Sampling of these chips from Fujitsu and Staccato Communications is scheduled for 2005, moving the companies closer to volume production and commercialization of these chips, targeting the consumer PC, digital home appliance, and mobile phone markets.

Hitachi Wins 3G Order from KDDI

Hitachi said it has won a contract worth over US $800 mn from KDDI Corp. for 3G wireless communications equipment. “We can’t give you specific figures, but the size of the contract exceeds the US$800 mn order KDDI awarded to South Korea’s Samsung Electronics yesterday,” said Hitachi spokeswoman Naoko Okada.

Korean Wireless Broadband Confusion

Following last week’s announcement that a number of companies in the space were working on so-called Super 3G, both Samsung and LG spoke up against the group, suggesting it was really an attempt by NTT DoCoMo to do an end run around efforts to settle on a 4G standard. Ed’s Note: Interesting that Samsung’s comment ignored Vodafone which was also one of the 26 companies on this group announcement.

Korea Set to Launch Mobile Broadcast

South Korea is poised to nudge past Japan in commercializing satellite digital multimedia broadcasting (DMB), thanks in large part to its strength in the cell phone industry. TU Media, the affiliate of Korea’s No. 1 mobile carrier SK Telecom, plans to start the world’s first handset-based satellite DMB services next Monday. By contrast, Japan’s Mobile Broadcasting Corp. (MBCo) has been suffering setbacks in drawing customers to its newly launched DMB services with non cell-phone terminals.