Year: <span>2006</span>
Year: 2006

Year: 2006

Casio G'zOne Headed to Verizon

According to PhoneScoop the FCC finally approved the NX9200 cellphone, the U.S. version of Casio’s popular G’zOne. The handset, which takes both styling and engineering cues from Casio’s G-Shock watch line, sports a Verizon logo in FCC documents. WWJ covered the launch here in May 2005 and said at the time “This could be a design winner should it land on US shores in time for the Christmas shopping rush.” Looks more like “almost in time for spring-break in Florida” instead!

Yozan Expanding Tokyo WiMAX

In 2005, Airspan Networks signed agreements with Yozan Inc. to deploy a Tokyo-wide WiMAX network, valued at $16.7 million, to deliver high speed IP connectivity capable of a wide array of data service offerings. The companies has now announced a further $26 million expansion to their contract, bringing its value to more than $42 million. Airspan expects to deliver between $5 million and $8 million of the total in the first quarter of 2006, with the balance by July.

We have noticed plenty of outdoor ads for their BitStand brand here lately — Eds

Vodafone Releases 904T Handset

Vodafone K.K. announced today that on 10 March 2006 it will commence nationwide sales of the Vodafone 904T, a new 3G handset by Toshiba. Vodafone K.K. will also simultaneously launch three new services and features with the sale of the Vodafone 904T: Vodafone live! CAST, a service that automatically delivers mobile magazine-like content to handsets, Vodafone Address Book, a service that lets customers back up their handset address books to a dedicated network server, and Deru Moji 3D Pictogram Display, which displays pop-up 3D animations in received mails.

Vodafone K.K. enables display of mails written in Chinese

Vodafone K.K. today announces the introduction of a new function to its Global MMS*1 service for Vodafone K.K. 3G handsets*2 which displays mails written in foreign languages. At the time of launch on 3 April 2006, customers will be able to send mails in Japanese to China Mobile and China Unicom customers, and also receive mails written in Chinese from customers using these same operators. Vodafone K.K. plans to expand this capability to more countries and regions that use non-English languages.

Japan 3G Customers Become Majority

The Telecom Carriers Assoc. stats just released for February sales activity indicate that the majority of mobile phone customers in Japan have now migrated to 3G. DoCoMo added over 828,000 new 3G contracts for a total of 22 million, KDDI/au added 309,000 for 21 million and Vodafone managed to sign-up 195,000 new 3G customers for a total of just under 3 million.

KDDI Announces Mobile WLAN Systems

Targeting the enterprise market, KDDI has announced two VoIP telephony solutions: AirIP’s Office Freedom, designed to operate using the newly released E02SA handset via 802.11g, and Fujitsu’s Mobile Office, which appears able to run on a wider range of handsets using a BREW application. The Office Freedom system also suggests that GPS functionality will be available to track employee current locations… and recent movements!