Nippon Television Network, Japan Telecom and the East Japan Railway Co. group announced that they would start a joint experiment to air TV news inside trains. Japan Telecom will transmit the news to monitors inside trains via wireless LAN (local area network) devices installed at JR East stations. The partners plan to begin commercial operations from around July this year.
K-cab is a SMS-based service for calling taxicabs, which is available in Iwate prefecture. The service can also be used with QR codes that encode location information. Vending machines that bear such location-encoded QR codes are being installed in varous places in the prefecture so that people can easily call a cab just by taking a picture of a QR code with their camera phones and connecting to the K-cabs’ taxicab dispatch website.
Sporting a 3.2-megapixel sensor, Sony Ericsson’s new K800i joins an exclusive club of high-res camera phones due out in Europe in 2006. Nearly identical to the K800i, the K790i will be a slightly less expensive alternative which omits 3G and video calling from the raft of available features, settling for tri-band GSM with EDGE for semi-high speed data. Making the leap from spinners and sliders to clamshell, the W300i is Sony Ericsson’s first clamshell Walkman phone, sharing the vast majority of its feature set with the spinner form factor W550i. A quad-band GSM handset with EDGE, the W300i includes the Walkman music player and comes bundled with a 256 MB card.
This afternoon’s press conference at the swank Roppongi Hills Hilton saw Vodafone Japan putting on a brave face during a difficult news day for the global company. With five separate product announcements – links after the jump – and a good presentation from Ota-san, the famous director of their claimed-world-first photo-mail service, it will take us a day or so to sort through everything and file a more detailed story. While the 904SH handset with Sharp’s new VGA screen will get most of the main-scream headlines, some of the other things we saw were much more interesting… for better and worse (WWJ subscribers login for a peek at Vodafone’s concept TV phone that was also on hand without much fanfare).
Opening her daughter’s monthly cell phone bill, the woman’s jaw goes slack with astonishment. Three million yen (approx. $26,000 usd). This is surely a mistake, she thinks. Why, my daughter wasn’t even in Japan for most of that time. “The figure is correct,” confirms a staff member of the carrier company, in a no-nonsense tone. “You are obliged to pay.” This state of affairs, explains Yomiuri Weekly, came about when her daughter’s cell phone was stolen during an overseas trip. Ironically, this particular phone could only be used to make calls in Japan. (Theft like this underscore the increasing amounts of personal data & cash carried on phones in Japan. The point here is that even if the phone itself won’t work overseas, the UIM card will, once transferred to a compatible GSM/WCDMA phone outside Japan — and many Japanese, unfamiliar with GSM-era SIM cards and PIN codes — don’t password-protect their UIM cards. — Eds.)
Must be a slow news day.. none-the-less this is pretty cool..!! A day in the life of a Japanese Salari-man.. Parallel Parking!
Vodafone K.K. today announced the launch of content for Vodafone live! CAST, an automatic content delivery service scheduled to begin with the mid-March 2006 roll out of two new compatible 3G handsets, the Vodafone 904T by Toshiba and the Vodafone 804N by NEC. The visual mobile magazine “yubio” will debut as the first available content offering. “AkibaRun!” and “chu*rara” are scheduled to follow later in March. Yubio (based on a play on words using the Japanese word for thumb, which is oya-yubi) is a visual mobile magazine that readers can quickly flick through with their thumbs and targeted at males from 25 to 35 years of age. Yubio aims to be a visually oriented all-round entertainment magazine with set themes for each day of the week. Each issue, delivered daily, will have approximately 15 pages. (More details after the jump.)
NTT DoCoMo, Inc. announced today that it achieved 2.5Gbps packet transmission in the downlink while moving at 20km/h. The fourth-generation (4G) radio access field experiment took place in Yokosuka, Kanagawa Prefecture on December 14, 2005. DoCoMo achieved a maximum 1Gbps speed in a similar field experiment on May 9, 2005. This time, by increasing the number of MIMO*1 transmission antennas from four to six and by using 64-QAM*2, data volume per transmission was increased from four bits to six bits. As a result, DoCoMo achieved a maximum speed of 2.5Gbps, which is faster than the International Telecommunication Union Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R)’s proposed standard.
East Japan Railway Co.’s new service that allows passengers to pay train fares with their cellphones has got off to a slow start. The number of compatible handsets is limited by JR East’s strict standards on scanning accuracy, designed to prevent accidents during rush hours. Cellphone carriers also blame limited geographical coverage and a JR East requirement for passengers to own the company’s View Card credit card. (Hmmmm… the credit card requirement could be a show-stopper. Give it 90 days… — Eds.)
NTT DoCoMo, Inc. and its eight regional subsidiaries have just announced they will postpone the launch of the 3G FOMA NM850iG handset, which had been scheduled for 24 February 2006. DoCoMo is confirming the handset’s quality and will launch the handset as soon as all confirmations are completed. (Ouch! — Eds.)
