New Tech & Services
New Tech & Services

New Tech & Services

Terrestrial TV-Enabled Cell Phone

KDDI R&D Laboratories have jointly developed a mobile-phone terminal that receives digital terrestrial TV broadcasts with interactive services in conjunction with NHK Science and Technical Research Labs. The two companies are the first in Japan to develop such a product in advance of digital TV broadcasting aimed at mobile terminals, which is due to commence in fiscal 2005. We visited NHK’s open house for a peek at their prototype, a modified Hitachi W11H handset. The demonstration allowed users to watch a newscast and scroll through a menu selection of relevant links to view different segments, like weather forecasts or sports highlights. A few frame-grabs below, or see the video program here.

The Ultimate 'Next-Generation' Mobile Gaming System

The Ultimate 'Next-Generation' Mobile Gaming System

Before all you Die Hard gamers on a post E3 convention rush get too excited, note we put quotes on “Next-Generation…” because this one is recommended for the age-6-and-up crowd. Also, to those business/suit types who are about to click away and search for “ARPU” and “Wi-Fi,” you might want to pause and read between the lines. OK, onto the skinny… Bandai have recently launched this very cool — a la Japanese style — clamshell handset to an eager young target market. In fact the handset was the must-have item during Japan’s recent Golden Week shopping spree… think Tickle-Me-Elmo-type hysteria. The “Card Commun” unit retails for about US$30 and features an onboard swipe function for the collectable character card-series based on Toei Animation’s popular Sunday morning cartoon show “Precure.” Simply put, this is like Pokemon and Tamagochi combimorphed, with a cycle or two of steroids tossed in! What really struck us was that while of course there is no voice function — or monthly call charges — it does have a P2P sync feature built in so kids can share content by joining their handsets together.

Mobile Payment Parking Lots

Japan’s leading parking lot operator Park 24 has announced the launch of an experiment designed to test a FeliCa-based cashless payment solution at its Times 24-hour metered parking lots. The experiment, to last through August 15, supports the N504iC and SO504iC. Park 24 currently has 5,225 parking sites with a total of 81,364 parking spaces across Japan.

Toshiba Announces Latest Strategic Memory Roadmaps

Toshiba Corporation today announced its latest strategic roadmaps for the memory market, which reflect the company’s continued focus on the rapidly-growing file storage market, the mobile electronics memory market, and high-performance solutions for networking and digital consumer applications. This market segmentation enables Toshiba to respond rapidly to customer requirements and develop advanced memory solutions to meet their needs. Toshiba’s current line-up of memory products serving these three market segments includes NAND Flash, high-density NOR Flash, low-power SRAMs, Pseudo SRAMs (PSRAMs) and advanced Multi-Chip Packages (MCP) which integrate various memory technologies into a single package; and for the networking and extreme performance digital consumer market, Network Fast-Cycle RAMs (Network FCRAMs(TM)) and XDR(TM) DRAM.

Digi B'casting for Cellies Starts Fall '05

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.

New Digital TV Phone from KDDI

KDDI R&D Laboratories announced that they have developed Japan’s first digital TV cellphone. Developed in cooperation with NHK Science and Technical Research Laboratories (NHK STRL), the new mobile phone is fully compatible with Broadcasting Mark-up Language (BML) to enable interactivity between mobile content and terrestrial digital TV services. Japan’s cellular terrestrial digital broadcasting service is set for launch in 2005.