DoCoMo has just announced that Cellcom Israel, Ltd. will start marketing DoCoMo’s i-mode service in the Israeli market as of today. The service, which will be offered over Cellcom’s GPRS network, is the eleventh market for i-mode, following Japan, Germany, the Netherlands, Taiwan, Belgium, France, Spain, Italy, Greece and Australia. DoCoMo sees great potential for i-mode growth in Israel, with its national population of approximately 7 million people.
Telstra will today become only the second telco in Australia to offer 3G mobile services, but the low-key launch reflects the changed expectations since Hutchison Telecom made a glitzy debut in 2003. Telstra’s i-mode service – which has been available for six months on the GSM network – is already offering 211 sites, although not all of them will be available on the 3G service straight away. “The sheer variety and depth of services available gives Telstra a big head start from other operators that have a more limited scope of services,” said tech research firm Ovum.
An extensive article in Wireless Week makes it clear that Motorola is only developing some Symbian handsets at the request of carrier partners “such as NTT DoCoMo”, which have invested in Motorola to keep the Symbian development going. Motorola’s primary OS emphasis is on its Linux/Java platform and Microsoft’s OS, neither of which is as expensive in royalties or implementation costs as Symbian, says Greg Besio, Motorola’s corporate vice president of mobile devices software.
Vodafone K.K. announced that on 1 September 2005 it launched a new Music Search service on its mobile internet service Vodafone live!, so customers can find Chaku-Uta, Chaku-Uta Long Version, and Chaku-Uta Full music tracks faster and with greater ease. For the price of communication charges alone, the Music Search service lets customers search Chaku-Uta and Chaku-Uta Full music track content by artist name. After inputting the artist’s name (even partially) in either kanji, hiragana, alphabet letters or numbers, Vodafone live! official artist song content is searched according to a given keyword and links to artist information pages are displayed.
NTT DoCoMo and Sony Ericsson have introduced a new concept model called the RADIDEN, claiming the world’s first cell phone that has been equipped with a three-band AM/FM/TV tuner. The handset incorporates a dual-front design: one side can be used as a cell phone, and on the other side is a radio designed for the 2G MOVA network. The radio features easy-to-select channels, a dedicated single-color sub-display (16.7×23.1mm), as well as visible buttons allowing the user to use i-mode while listening to the radio.
Tokyo Broadcasting System Inc. announced Wednesday that it will issue 20.6 billion yen in new shares to major ad agency Dentsu Inc. and several of its other business partners to raise money for new projects. The television broadcaster also said it will invest 10 billion yen in eAccess Ltd.’s mobile phone business as part of efforts to build its presence in the nation’s wireless network, which is rapidly gaining influence as a media outlet.
