Lucent has deployed more than 90,000 spread-spectrum base stations and has enabled more than 50,000 base stations in networks worldwide to support 3G CDMA2000 services, far more than any other equipment vendor. They have also deployed commercial 3G networks for more than 25 mobile operators in North and South America, Europe, Asia and the Australia and New Zealand region. An interesting interview with Lucent Mobility CTO Paul Mankiewich.
The model that many customers have been waiting for, NEC’s version of the 900i, are to go on sale on Feb. 22, NEC and DoCoMo said today. Meanwhile, DoCoMo has said it’s going to show FOMA off at the 3GSM World Congress 2004 in France next week with a direct link to Japan. Excitement is growing about the 900i series, with informal impressions collected by WWJ, plus hard evidence that we’ve heard from InfoPLANT indicating that NEC’s 900i could be a smash hit.
WWJ has …so far…refrained from the comment on the AT&T Wireless dealdizmo, the value of which seems to have crept about a billion a day, up to $35b over the last week, according to media speculation. Mmm. The Japanese press has pronounced that DoCoMo has confirmed that it wasnot bidding (and had no intention of getting involved in) any deal about who, what and when was going to suck up the losses and deal with the huge potential with AT&T Wireless Services. Well, we say, ?Quel surprise!” For us, the whole episode was the non-story of the month as regards DoCoMo, because there was no way Keiji Tachikawa was going to put ANY money on the line to prop up AT&T; after the losses DoCoMo got saddled with when its last foreign mobile lebensraum went south. So now AT&T has been Cingulared, it’s time for DoCoMo to cash in its chips.
Those watching this week’s video program will get to see what a howler Bow-Lingual is on Vodafone’s new V610SH handset from Sharp. We are just itching to find out if the same inventive and creative genius that seemed to permeate the old J-Phone can re-establish itself in 2004 at Vodafone KK. A recent study shows that, as we suspected, the Japanese public is going gangbusters for TV mobile phones. Having developed Japan’s first TV celly, the former J-Phone Corps have proven, yet again, they were ahead of the curve in understanding what customers want. But it is also apparent that Vodafone KK will need more than highly entertaining doggy gimmicks if it is to stop losing market share to KDDI and DoCoMo’s 3G services.
We jumped at the chance to take the new Bow-Lingual Connect software for wireless ‘walkies’ recently. Takara, makers of the popular canine speech translator, had a dog to lend us, but it fell ill. Then a friendly ballerina’s French Bulldog pulled out at the last minute, so we conducted this highly unscientific test on Vodafone’s V601SH handset by Sharp using our own pre-recorded (with Movie Sha-Mail) video of a since-deceased beagle. We may have been barking up the wrong tree with this approach, or howling mad to try to make sense of Bow-Lingual, but even if Takara’s mobile version is a bit beastly, it shouldn’t distract from the unit itself, which is a jolly good cell phone. Full Program Run-time 11:38
Nepro Japan published results of a survey of mobile phone users about services and functions. According to the survey, the most wanted function is a TV, as about 40% of the respondents pointed to it. In response to a question regarding “functions desirable for future mobile phones” (multiple answers allowed), “TV” (43%), “dictionaries” (35%) and “keys” (29%) were the top three. Functions such as “electronic wallet” (25%) and “TV phone” (24%) did not attract many supporters.
