Kyoto University and the research arm of telecom carrier KDDI Corp. conducted an experiment Friday to see how mobile phones equipped with global positioning systems can be used to provide evacuation guidance in the event of a disaster. About 30 students took part in the experiment, held in the vicinity of the university’s campus in Kyoto, bringing with them GPS-equipped phones designed to display the nearest evacuation center.
Sharp expects its total handset shipments, to grow 18 percent year-on-year to 13 million units in 2006, with 3G-enabled models accounting for 50 percent of shipments, said Noboru Hanioka, head of Sharp’s overseas telecom marketing division. By 2008, Sharp’s overall handset shipments should reach 20 million units, Hanioka predicted.
Digital deflation, the market aberration that sees prices fall as fast as products improve, is hitting no industry harder than cell-phone hardware. Handset makers are restructuring, but the problems may be bigger than any single company can handle. In a recent interview, NEC President Akinobu Kanasugi said the company aims to decide by June on a drastic restructuring measure, such as operational alliance and integration with a rival. “If we fail to recover profitability (this year), we will be punished by the stock market,” he said.
KDDI and Okinawa cellular have announced what they claim to be the world’s first “Voice Input” function of a decentralized voice recognition feature. To be released in cooperation with the popular GPS service EZ Navi walk, the new offering will become available for their au customers as of early February 2006. Based on a server-side application, “voice recognition on large-scale can achieve high accuracy compared to past versions” (which ran processed commands on the handset) according to the company press release.
Fujitsu Microelectronics America will demonstrate its newest WiMAX reference design system at the 12th annual Wireless Communications Association (WCA) International Symposium, January 17-19, at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose. The Fujitsu demonstration will feature a WiMAX base station communicating with a subscriber station built using the Fujitsu WiMAX reference design kit. The kit incorporates all the hardware and software required to allow designers to develop WiMAX-compliant equipment based on the Fujitsu MB87M3400 WiMAX System-on-Chip (SoC), the industry-leading WiMAX implementation.
According to leaks around the web, Fujitsu-Siemens will unveil a high-end smartphone loaded with features at 3GSM in March. The T800 [ .jpg image ] will roll-out a QWERTY keyboard with a 240×240 display, rumored to be running Windows Mobile 5.0 Phone Edition on a 416 MHz XScale processor. Also predicted 64 MB of RAM and 128 MB of Flash ROM for storage the new unit will supposedly offer Wi-Fi (802.11b/g) and Bluetooth 2.0 as well.
