Year: <span>2007</span>
Year: 2007

Year: 2007

Major Shake-up at Faith

Several sources are reporting that Intel Capital and Yoshimoto Kogyo have bought a small stake in Faith Inc.. Last week Faith’s U.S. arm Moderati was sold to Bellrock Media, as pointed out in the most recent Mobile Music Watch newsletter; “Following its board meeting last Friday, Faith Inc. announced that co-founder and COO Makoto Nakanishi will resign from the company and acquire 100% of its struggling US subsidiary Faith Communications.”. According to their statement, the US subsidiary is losing money and plagued with problems, including a postponed trial launch of its Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) service and heavy capital requirements.

Most Popular Japanese Handsets in 2006

We caught a feature article on a domestic mobile news site that ranked Japan’s most popular selling models for last year. For KDDI/au the W41CA by Casio was put on the market in February and maintained top place for almost 33 weeks. The continued success of that model was attributed to the feature set which includes; EZ FeliCa (mobile wallet), FM radio tuner, PC Site Viewer (Opera browser) and 2.6-inch wide screen display. The second half sales were dominated by the W43S “Walkman Phone” by Sony Ericsson. See the full ranking list after the jump.

eMobile Unveils SmartPhone & Flat-rate Price Plan

eMobile Unveils SmartPhone & Flat-rate Price Plan by Mobikyo KKeMobile announced their debut package offering – complete with terminals, data cards and flat-rate HSDPA price plan – today at a Tokyo press conference with company representatives joined by notable industry partners including Paul Jacobs, CEO of Qualcomm, Darren Huston, CEO of Microsoft Japan, and Masafumi Matsumoto, representative director from Sharp. The upstart carrier’s founder, chairman and CEO, Sachio Semmoto (who was co-founder of DDI, which became KDDI), called their newly introduced Sharp EM-One smartphone, “the next-generation mobile broadband device” – which was “designed to deliver always-on broadband at a reasonable monthly flat-rate price.”

The new Sharp terminal is bound to be popular with the same crowd who lined-up to get Willcom’s Zero3 model, also made by Sharp, in late 2005. The EM-One is a touch-screen qwerty-keyboard dual-slider device sporting a 4-inch LCD screen with Japan’s first WVGA (800×480)-resolution screen and Windows Mobile 5.0 (with all the typical office functions). At only 18mm thin, it even comes ready to watch 1Seg digital TV broadcasts and – according to the specs – the unit sports a Marvell PXA270 cpu running at 520MHz with 512MB of Flash memory and 128MB RAM. Perhaps most interesting are the rather agressive price plans, which bundle the device with fixed- and mobile-broadband connection services to attract new customers.

The company also announced four new data cards including a PC Card unit produced by NEC and a USB design coming from Huawei, which will run on the same high-speed network and tabehoudai all-you-can-eat billing model. The new services will be available starting 31 March in five major population areas including Tokyo, Aichi, Osaka and Kyoto. More details after the jump.

3 in 4 Japanese Mobiles Currently Spam-Free

japan.internet.com recently reported on a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research on the subject of mobile phones and spam. Over three days at the start of February 330 peope from their monitor group successfully completed a private internet-based questionnaire. The sample was 51.8% feamle, with 26.7% in their twenties, 40.6% in their thirties, 25.2% in their forties, 5.5% in their fifties, and 2.1% in their sixties. I’ve been spam-free on my phone, perhaps because I only sign up with reputable firms. However, my wife has used YNot electronic greeting cards just recently, and has been plagued with a flood of spam from Rakuten partners. Full details with graphs Here.

20% of Japanese Parents Give Children Mobile

japan.internet.com recently reported on a survey conducted at the start of the month by Cross Marketing Inc regarding children and mobile phones. 300 members of their monitor panel who had children successfully completed a private internet-based questionnaire. The sample was split 50:50 male and female, and the ages of their children (some of the respondents had more than one) were 11.0% under three years old, 41.7% older than three but not yet entered elementary school, 30.0% in the first two years of elementary school (aged six or seven), 19.7% in the third or fourth year of elementary school, 28.0% in the fifth and sixth year of elementary school, 31.0% in middle school, and 20.7% in high school or older. Full details with graphs Here.

3GSM 2007 Award Winners

The 12th Annual GSM Association Global Mobile Awards were announced last night in Barcelona at the annual industry event which showcases the best of the mobile world. The stars of the night were the 2007 Global Mobile Awards winners, whose achievements provide an insight into the services, devices and innovation that are taking the mobile industry forward. Sony Ericsson’s K800 CyberShot handset won best 3G handset and Tokyo based I-play’s “The Fast and the Furious” took Best Made for Mobile Game. See the full category list and winners after the jump.