DoCoMo will seek to revitalise lacklustre sales of its FOMA service with the launch of three new handsets. From next month DoCoMo will start receiving an estimated 6m 3G handsets from NEC, Panasonic and Fujitsu in a bid to increase its 3G customer base to 10.6m. In conjunction with the new handsets, DoCoMo has earmarked Y120bn ($1.1bn) of tariff cuts during the current financial year.
Yesterday, the Wireless Watch Japan site was slammed by record traffic after we posted our first big Net news scoop: Casio’s announcement of what appears to be the world’s first 3-megapixel camera phone, due for release later this summer via KDDI. And that wasn’t the only big Japan handset news from the past few days: both KDDI (working with Hitachi) and NTT DoCoMo have announced concept models capable of receiving terrestrial digital TV broadcasts, while Vodafone’s been mentioned as working on new karaoke-enabled handsets with Sharp and Toshiba. Phones in Japan have become culturally connected communicators and terminal makers who think more like artists and less like engineers will flourish.
Japan’s mobile phone shipments for fiscal 2003 approached the record high. The Japan Electronics and Information Technology Industries Association (JEITA) has announced that the total number of shipments for fiscal year 2004 (Apr. ’03 to Mar. ’04) reached 49,843,000 units, following two years of consecutive growth.
Vodafone K.K. today said it plans an extensive series of upgrades to its 3G network so that the Vodafone group’s Japanese outpost will have 99.6% population coverage by the end of May. This begs the question, where are the new terminals that are needed to really pull in the subscribers?
Quasi-governmental Nippon Hoso Kyokai or NHK and five private-sector broadcasters are likely to finally start services of terrestrial digital broadcasting for cellular phones in fiscal 2005, the Nikkei published in an article today, thanks, among other factors, to folks settling on the H.264 (MPEG-4 AVC) standard. What the Nikkei has forgotten to mention also was that NHK will also broadcast to MBCO as well.
April is emerging to be a milestone month in Japan’s 3G rollout. According to the most recent Telecom Carriers Association figures. Milestone One: Japan added a million new 3G subscribers in April. Milestone Two: April’s surge also simultaneously brought the total number of 3G users here to over 17.7 million. So what you say? Well, this also meant that for the first time Japan’s 3G user base passed 20% of Japan’s 82 million mobile subscriber base, or 21.6% to be precise, as of April 30! Milestone Three: DoCoMo added an incredible 530,500 FOMA subscribers. Not only was this up 483% on the same month a year ago, it was the FIRST TIME ever that DoCoMo beat KDDI au in net 3G adds!!
In a report released April 6, Tokyo-based Ipse Marketing gave the results of a survey conducted in January 2004 on the degree of usage of advanced phone features. The report said that users of mobile phones are “more adept at utilizing various functions in a mobile phone than they were a year ago,” and specifically highlighted Java application programs, movies, video, and the use of an external memory card as new features that the average i-moder in the street is increasingly using…
Seeing is believing! – Travelling to Tokyo to meet some of the best companies and individuals in the Japanese mobile economy once again delivered an incredible ROI for our time and money. Working with Daniel Scuka, co-founder of Toyko-based Wireless Watch Japan, is always fun and very professional, especially on Tokyo turf where Daniel spent 9 years of his life and knows almost everyone. This time, from 12 – 16 April 2004, we enjoyed the company of 10 happy participants including operators, game developers, researchers, analysts, consultants and usability engineers from Germany, Switzerland, Austria, USA, Australia and even Japan…
Kyocera has unveiled the AH-K3001V handset [image] for the Japanese market. It’s the first handset available in Japan that uses the Opera browser to access the Internet. The phone is fully Opera-branded, including an Opera-branded softkey that brings users online for Web surfing. The AH-K3001V will be available to DDI Pocket AirH” subscribers by mid-May.
Oki Electric and NTT Communications announced that they have developed a new automated teller machine (ATM) that can exchange data with infrared port-equipped mobile devices including cellphones. The new ATM enables account holders to withdraw cash and check the balance using a mobile phone [.jpg image] just as if they do with a cash card.
