The company announced today they will launch ‘DCMX’ consumer credit services via iD, DoCoMo’s brand and platform for mobile credit cards. Users of Osaifu-Keitai (Felica e-wallet phones) phones will be able to choose from two plans to make highly secure purchases from small to large amounts using their phones as DoCoMo-issued credit cards.
NHK and five commercial TV broadcasters held a splashy launch party in Tokyo’s central Shinjuku train station on Saturday afternoon, announcing the official start of terrestrial ‘One-Seg’ broadcast services. The carriers have lined up accordingly: NTT DoCoMo has partnered with Nippon Television and Fuji Television, while KDDI has forged a partnership with TV Asahi.
The new digital tuner-enabled handsets, coming from Panasonic, Hitachi and Sanyo, should deliver up to three hours of TV viewing time by processing and decoding only the requested channel — as opposed to current analog units which run only about an hour and eat more juice as they decode all incoming broadcast channels. Vodafone’s 905SH from Sharp is rumoured to be available just in time for the World Cup in June.
WWJ has been covering this story since the spring of 2004 when early prototype handsets were first introduced at an NHK open-house event.
The Tobacco Institute of Japan said Thursday it will start switching cigarette vending machines nationwide to new machines featuring an age-verification system from March 2008 to prevent minors from buying cigarettes. The institute announced that a total of 620,000 tobacco vending machines nationwide will be switched during 2008 to types that can read “tobacco cards” with integrated circuit chips bought by adult smokers.
Not surpised, we’ve seen the same age verification function on “Sake Pass” machines [ .jpg image ] for some time already — Eds.
Japan-based Omron Corp. has developed a electronic control antenna technology claimed to be the first embedded in an UHF-band RFID reader that can improve RFID tag reading performance. UHF RFID tags have been subject to multipath interference, an inherent problem of electromagnetic signals, which can make an RFID tag unreadable even if it is within the range of the reader.
According to a press release from KDDI/au today, the company has just announced a new handset, the W43T [.jpg] from Toshiba. Also just announced: this Toshiba unit will incorporate the company’s new 3D Navi GPS service functions and that both will be introduced to the market starting in late April. This latest CDMA-1X unit also offers LISMO mobile music and touts a 3.2-megapixel camera, although it does not have a 4GB HDD, like the recent W41T, or the mobile commerce ‘FeliCa’ chip.
Here’s a quick video clip we shot at the Vodafone press conference when they introduced the new V804SS handset by Samsung — the first Samsung handset in Japan — going on sale here finally today. It has a few up-close examples of the company’s new dynamic email application, “Deru Moji” 3D Pictogram Display with pop-up animations, that we thought were pretty interesting.
While the functionality is only interoperable between a few handsets so far, this is a mobile mail nation and ‘cool factor’ really does count. Look for more discussion online about this next-gen offering — centered on when will it hit EU and US markets. Remember you saw it here first on WWJ!
