Carriers
Carriers

Carriers

Raku-Raku Basic Handset Announced

DoCoMo has announced the newest model in their so-called ‘easy phone’ series, the Raku-Raku Basic, targeted at seniors who require user-friendly handsets equipped with special functions. Specific features include “Slow Voice”, which improves comprehensibility through embedded software that slows the other person’s voice speed, and “Clear Voice” noise-detection, which automatically adjusts voice and ringtone volume according to surrounding noise level. Enhanced “Read Aloud” audibly announces the name of the caller or e-mail sender and provides audio readouts of i-mode pages, while “Simple Mail Generation” offers preset messages for quick replies to e-mails.

KDDI Continues Net Subscriber Advantage

The CDMA Development Group has congratulated KDDI for signing up more new users than their rivals since Japan’s mobile number portability (MNP) rules took effect on October 24, 2006. While more than one million subscribers changed their service provider between October 24, 2006 and January 31, 2007, KDDI has witnessed a net increase of 600,000 3G subscribers. The other Japanese operators have seen a net reduction. Also, when considering all new subscriptions within the three months ending in January 2007, KDDI garnered 67 percent of the total number of net subscriptions.

EZ News Flash Hits 1 Million Users

KDDI has announced the number of users for their EZ news flash service exceeded one million people
on Saturday, February 17 this year. EZ news flash launched on Thursday, September 21, 2006 as an
information delivery service, weather news for example with BCMCS to deliver instant and updating multicast information to the standby screen of subscribers mobile phone. The service charges a small information fee while data charge is free.

eMobile Unveils SmartPhone & Flat-rate Price Plan

eMobile Unveils SmartPhone & Flat-rate Price Plan by Mobikyo KKeMobile announced their debut package offering – complete with terminals, data cards and flat-rate HSDPA price plan – today at a Tokyo press conference with company representatives joined by notable industry partners including Paul Jacobs, CEO of Qualcomm, Darren Huston, CEO of Microsoft Japan, and Masafumi Matsumoto, representative director from Sharp. The upstart carrier’s founder, chairman and CEO, Sachio Semmoto (who was co-founder of DDI, which became KDDI), called their newly introduced Sharp EM-One smartphone, “the next-generation mobile broadband device” – which was “designed to deliver always-on broadband at a reasonable monthly flat-rate price.”

The new Sharp terminal is bound to be popular with the same crowd who lined-up to get Willcom’s Zero3 model, also made by Sharp, in late 2005. The EM-One is a touch-screen qwerty-keyboard dual-slider device sporting a 4-inch LCD screen with Japan’s first WVGA (800×480)-resolution screen and Windows Mobile 5.0 (with all the typical office functions). At only 18mm thin, it even comes ready to watch 1Seg digital TV broadcasts and – according to the specs – the unit sports a Marvell PXA270 cpu running at 520MHz with 512MB of Flash memory and 128MB RAM. Perhaps most interesting are the rather agressive price plans, which bundle the device with fixed- and mobile-broadband connection services to attract new customers.

The company also announced four new data cards including a PC Card unit produced by NEC and a USB design coming from Huawei, which will run on the same high-speed network and tabehoudai all-you-can-eat billing model. The new services will be available starting 31 March in five major population areas including Tokyo, Aichi, Osaka and Kyoto. More details after the jump.

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.

DoCoMo 703i-Series Roll-Out

Several more of Docomo’s latest 3G models, as announced in January, are rolling-out here this weekend. While the N703i by NEC was available last week, the Panasonic, Mitsubishi and waterproof! Fujitsu 703i’s hit the store shelves on Feb. 2nd. We have noticed an unusually aggressive amount of advertising – both outdoor and on TV – for these new models, so the TCA results in early March should be rather interesting.