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

Year: 2007

DoCoMo Announces New 3G Platform JV

NTT DoCoMo, Renesas, Fujitsu, Mitsubishi, Sharp and Sony Ericsson have announced that they plan to jointly develop a next-generation mobile phone platform with completion targeted for mid-2008. Renesas plans to provide the platform to the global W-CDMA market, in addition to customers in Japan, aiming to further reduce costs. The six companies have agreed to the joint development project in an effort to provide advanced functionality – with a common base – for 3G handsets worldwide.

January Carrier Stats Released

The latest subscriber figures were announced today with good news for SoftBank Mobile and what must be disappointing results for DoCoMo while KDDI continues to lead the pack in over-all performance again in January. We had mentioned that many industry watchers were expecting SoftBanks new flat-rate voice plan – announced in early January – would have an positive impact, and it certainly did. Most surprising was the small month-on-month loss of i-mode customers, the second time in 3 months, for the incumbent.

NEC Handset Shipment Est. Down 8%

NEC Corp. announced on Tuesday that it’s expecting to ship 5.5 million mobile phones in the year to March 31st 2007, down 8 percent from its previous estimate of 6 million phones. The company also said it now expects to post a loss of less than 40 billion yen ($333 million) in the cellphone business in fiscal2006/07, an improvement over its previous estimate of a loss of 50 billion yen.

Warner Music Launches Rhino on i-mode

Warner Music has partnered with Catalyst Mobile to roll-out Rhino Music Service as an official content offering on DoCoMo’s i-mode menu. The service will provide monthly subscribers – at 315jpy – with search, recommendation, preview, and downloading of individual assets. Other features also include ‘This Day in Rock History’ trivia and ‘Songs You Know Ring Tone Corner.’

Contextual Ad Technology for Mobile

According to a recent article from Nikkei Electronics, Overture and NTT Data have developed a contextual advertisement suite designed for mobile. The companies started distributing their “Contents-Match Mobile” beta version to a mobile portal run by Recruit Japan last week. The story also mentions that this offering claims to be world’s first contextual ad offering developed specifically for mobile phone websites.

DoCoMo Signs New Deal with Aquafairy

DoCoMo just announced that it has signed a new basic agreement with Aquafairy regarding the companies joint R&D project for development of handset rechargers using Aquafairy’s hydrogen fuel cell technology. The agreement includes details of the development process and specifies the roles of each partner for the commercialization of the recharger.