Vodafone K.K. announced today that from April 1, 2004 it will add a new menu option with links to third party portal sites on its Vodafone live! At the time of launch, customers will be able to easily access the portal sites of three major mobile portal operators – “infoseek mobile” (Rakuten Inc.), “excite mobile” (Excite Japan Co.,Ltd.), and “Keitai BIGLOBE” (NEC Corporation) – by following menus from the top page without having to input URLs.
G-mode has signed a licensing agreement with inTouch Wireless Services of Singapore, and begun providing subscribers of PT Telekomunikasi Selular Indonesia, the leading GSM provider in Indonesia, with Java-enabled cellphone game titles. The GSM provider had 10 million subscribers as of February 2004. The number of mobile phone users in Indonesia is estimated at about 18 million, and is expected to reach 24-27 million by year-end.
It’s official: the switch to flat rate for packet communications by NTT DoCoMo starts on June 1 at 3,900 yen per month—300 yen cheaper than KDDI. Is this the start of a new era of price wars that rapidly commoditize 3G services—reminiscent of what happened on Japan’s ADSL market a few years ago? Not if DoCoMo president Keiji Tachikawa can help it. Our first observation today was how few subscribers the flat rate will apply to—only heavy users who are used to price plans starting at 6,700 yen. The second point was DoCoMo’s opinion that perhaps only a third of heavy users might take advantage of the flat rate option this year.
Here’s one for the books: Symbian OS proponent Fujitsu and Mitsubishi (which makes decent handsets for the domestic market but is unknown outside of Japan) have announced that they are getting together to develop new FOMA handsets. The press release today appears to be dressed up in terms of Fujitsu offering its expertise to Mitsubishi with Symbian, but it also hints that the two will combine on hardware development too. Given the fact that Fujitsu is a leading proponent of Symbian, and that DoCoMo president Keiji Tachikawa hinted that Symbian will be the OS of choice, the announcement looks as if Mitsubishi has figured the lay of the land and jumped on the bandwagon.
Softbank Corp is rushing to break into Japan’s 8-Trillion Yen cellular phone market by every possible means, even though there are already four dominant cellular operators. “We will start the business one way or another,” said Masayoshi Son, president of Softbank. Some experts predict that Softbank will offer a cheaper price for the TD-CDMA based data communication service than existing competitors.
NEC Corp. has just done something for wireless communications speeds, but possibly not in the way you were expecting. Local media has reported that NEC has just developed a WLAN/ 3G/ PHS technology capable of automatically roaming to find connections for passengers on board Japan’s shinkansen bullet trains.
