Mobile Users
Mobile Users

Mobile Users

DoCoMo Does 3G Olympics

WWJ Editors, 16 June 2004
The irony of it all! After taking a 1-trillion-yen ($7.54 billion at the time) charge on overseas investments back in 2002 to seed the world with W-CDMA, DoCoMo today announced that it will set up temporary 3G FOMA base stations in Athens, Greece, from July 30 to September 30, 2004 enabling FOMA subscribers attending the competition to enjoy the service with the same handsets they are currently using in Japan. That’s if the electricity works… and the stadium is built!

Sony, VeriSign Japan Enter into Alliance for Security FeliCa Card

Under the terms of the alliance, Sony and VeriSign Japan will jointly market Sony’s latest FeliCa card that provides network security using VeriSign’s Managed Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) Service. The network security-enabled card is embedded with Sony’s Dual-interface IC technology, co-developed with Infineon Technologies of Germany, to provide PC users with system authentication and email encryption capabilities.

Vodafone's ex-CEO: The Pre-Postmortem

The news out of Vodafone today is that Darryl E. Green, CEO of both Vodafone KK and Vodafone Holdings KK, has resigned for personal reasons. An interim CEO has been appointed while the companies search for a permanent replacement. Green’s departure is not unrelated, we suspect, to Vodafone’s recent grim Japanese financial results. While it’s too early for a full postmortem, it might help bring perspective to the situation to point out a number of successes that Vodafone achieved on Green’s watch.

Mobile Digital TV: Not (Yet) to a 3G Celly

Today, Portable Reportable looks at the future of cell phone broadcasting and consider what will happen when cell phones will be able to received digital TV broadcasts. NTT DoCoMo and KDDI have quite different plans on how consumers will use digital TV. KDDI appears to be planning to allow the handset to receive digiTV and then use the phone’s 3G data connection as the viewer feedback, marketing, and sales channel — similar to how the FM Keitai works now with analog radio and the preinstalled BREW application.
Full program run-time: 5:01Portable Reportable audio updates are short, 3- to 5-minute news items in MP3 format. You can listen via PC or download and copy to your portable player for tomorrow morning’s commute. — Eds.

Japan's 2003 Cellular Shipments Figures

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.