The latest Music Media Watch newsletter from Steve Myers came out yesterday with an op-ed feature on the-phone which we covered to great extent – for our paid subscribers – back in January. That being said it’s well worth the read (for free) as it even popped-up on the O’Reilly Radar this morning 😎 Meanwhile, there’s a few other “Noteworthy News” tips clipped from his blast after the jump.
DoCoMo introduced their 704i-series of eight 3G FOMA handsets, as mentioned yesterday, featuring a range of models from Fujitsu, NEC, Panasonic, Sharp, Sony Ericsson, Mitsubishi and the LG Chocolate design. The F704i, SO704i, N704iμ and P704iμ will be available this month while the D704i and SH704i will go on sale by the end of August. The P704i will be launched by the end of September and we’ll have to wait for that LG sweetness until sometime in October. Specs and images after the jump.
DoCoMo has announced they will unveil their next 700i-series line-up of FOMA 3G handset models this afternoon at a press conference to be held at Roppongi Hills Tower starting at 15:00 JST. They will broadcast a live video stream of the proceedings – Here. The on-demand version will also be available to view shortly afterwards Here.
DoCoMo announced yesterday that they have agreed to form a joint venture company with Casio to provide digital payment systems, mainly for DoCoMo’s iD mobile credit-card platform, and related customer relationship management services. Combining Casio’s digital cash-register technologies and retail support know-how with DoCoMo’s expertise in mobile payments, the joint venture, to be named CXD NEXT, will develop services centered around Casio’s new cash register with virtual private network capability and reader/writer compatibility for mobile e-wallet services.
TV Bank, a division of the SoftBank Group, has announced a new contents service, Yahoo! Animation, in addition to the Yahoo! Streaming channel which was introduced at the end of May. A so-called digest version of official baseball games, offered free of charge via the operators Yahoo! mobile portal, will include games from Japanese major league baseball teams including; the Chiba Lotte Marines, Tohoku Golden Eagles, Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters along with the company-owned Fukuoka Softbank Hawks. The service sounds very much like the product offered by Tokyo-based Craftmax as described in our video interview conducted back in spring 2005.
According reports on the Japanese web, Nokia’s luxury brand Vertu models will finally hit these shores sometime in late 2008. Already available in some 48 countries around the world, the company appears to have struck a distribution deal in Japan with 3G units – chipsets may well have been cause for the delay – set to sell through a SoftBank Group agency.
