Foreseeing that demand for 3G phones will get on track in Europe and North America this year, sparking competition with rivals in Japan, Samsung and LG are turning up the heat to market their new 3G models to customers in these regions. Mobile phone makers in Japan such as NEC, Panasonic, Sharp and Sanyo, which have concentrated on supplying W-CDMA phones to carriers in Japan, are also reportedly poised to focus more on global markets this year.
QUALCOMM Incorporated, pioneer and world leader of Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) digital wireless technology, today announced the open call for submissions for the BREW® 2005 Developer Awards. BREW publishers and developers are encouraged to submit their top BREW applications by completing an online entry form and providing a demo of their application. The deadline for online nominations is March 11 and submission materials must be received by March 28. Finalists will be announced on the BREW 2005 Awards Web site on May 9, then winners will be revealed at the awards ceremony hosted during the BREW 2005 Conference, June 1-3, in San Diego. For more information, visit: www.brew2005awards.com.
UIQ Technology today announced the new partnership program, UIQ Alliance, which is targeting a chosen set of companies providing applications or services, based on the UIQ user interface. The UIQ Alliance Partner Program provides an increased choice of UIQ compatible technologies and knowledge that will be introduced to UIQ customers. “Members of the UIQ Alliance will possess diverse skills and experience, and deliver a variety of compelling technologies, products and services to the growing ecosystem built around UIQ,” says Johan Sandberg, CEO, UIQ Technology. “This will make it easier for mobile phone manufacturers to find good products and services supporting UIQ, which will be of high importance to the creation of a mass market for mobile phones based on UIQ”
Broadband Internet provider eAccess announced at a press conference here Thursday that it will start W-CDMA experiments in late January in the 1.7-GHz spectrum by partnering with Fujitsu. eAccess President Sachio Senmoto appeared confident that Japan’s telecoms ministry will approve the company’s application to offer mobile services starting in 2006. The trials include performance testing of W-CDMA base stations and a speed evaluation of next-gen HSDPA (so-called Super 3G).
Yesterday, NTT DoCoMo announced the 2G N506iS by NEC [.jpg], which the company says is the world’s first mobile phone featuring a flat-panel display that also functions as a speaker. The flat-panel speaker emits sound by sending vibrations throughout the entire display panel. A user can hear the person on the other end by placing an ear anywhere on the panel. DoCoMo says that this makes audiovisual content more vivid than conventional handsets, whose speakers are located on the side of the display.
One of the best things about having a few days off over the holiday season in Tokyo is having time to wander casually through Akihabara and check out the latest gadgets. 2005 is shaping up as a showdown year for music-enabled portable devices and I couldn’t help but notice how DoCoMo’s new 3G handset, the SH901ic by Sharp, really does seem to have at least a slight style similarity to the iPod. As the network speed increases — and with flat-rate packet costs and improved handset technology — critical mass adoption by mainstream users buying even more data seems to be at hand. As competition increases, how will carriers, handset makers and content providers adapt their offerings over the coming year?
While it remains to be seen exactly what kind of applications and services will hit the streets, it has become increasingly clear that a race is on. Having both KDDI and Vodafone launch fixed-line access to content for mobile devices in Q42004 shows, at least in the mid-term, they are ramping up the business model to deliver larger-size files to end users. A little crystal-ball gazing for the coming year — and some very cool Akiba gadget photos — after the jump.
KDDI started New Year with a bang yesterday, with three seperate press releases; they announced over 1 million full-song downloads (already!) and something about OTA (over-the-air) updates which we can’t quite make out. However the one about their new BREW-based, Bluetooth-controlled robot [ .jpg ] looked pretty interesting. It seems that Robot Labs has a 29-cm tall, 2-legged beast that weighs in at about 950 grams. Available in early February for about 198,000 yen, it [ .pdf ] has servo motors and gyro sensors — so it’s got to be cool — and will respond to various movement commands (“kick,” “punch”) issued from the cell-phone appli via bluetooth.. Wow!
In a report on Unstrung, Justin Springham comments on the significance of this week’s KDDI contract awards to Korean and Japanese vendors (noted by WWJ here). Yesterday, Hitachi seemed to beat Samsung’s day-earlier deal with KDDI Corp., revealing that it had also secured a CDMA 1XEV-DO Revision-A network upgrade deal with the carrier worth approximately 100 billion yen. Springham writes that: “Hitachi’s win eclipses the earlier $800 million deal with Samsung. Reports suggested Samsung claimed to be the sole supplier of Revision A kit to KDDI.”
Fujitsu Limited and Staccato Communications, Inc. announced a partnership under which they will provide all-CMOS, single-chip wireless universal serial bus (USB) and ultra-wideband (UWB) solutions for the global marketplace. CMOS single-chip wireless USB products are compliant with Multiband OFDM Alliance (MBOA) UWB specifications. Sampling of these chips from Fujitsu and Staccato Communications is scheduled for 2005, moving the companies closer to volume production and commercialization of these chips, targeting the consumer PC, digital home appliance, and mobile phone markets.
Hitachi said it has won a contract worth over US $800 mn from KDDI Corp. for 3G wireless communications equipment. “We can’t give you specific figures, but the size of the contract exceeds the US$800 mn order KDDI awarded to South Korea’s Samsung Electronics yesterday,” said Hitachi spokeswoman Naoko Okada.
