Renesas has announced [JPN] their latest application processor for terrestrial digital broadcasting. The so-called “SH-Mobile MT1” for next-gen. mobile handsets is the first in the industry to enable watch and record/reproduction of 1Seg TV from Full HD feeds in Japan and begins the sample shipment in April, 2010.
The GSMA today reported significant progress with its Rich Communication Suite (RCS) initiative, a service that provides mobile operators with a feature-rich portfolio of interoperable communication services, enabling customers to access a wide range of advanced messaging applications direct from their handset’s contact list.
KDDI is planning to roll out the “au Femtocell” – a miniature base station to be used indoors by summer 2010, and will commence trial operations in locations throughout the Kanto region beginning March 2010. “au Femtocell” is a miniature base station that creates a small mobile coverage area of a radius of approximately 10 meters; the service will be offered to the consumer market.
Japan’s domestic shipments of cellular phones and personal handyphone system handsets declined 9.9 percent on the year to 3.13 million units in November. The decline followed two straight months of year-on-year increases, which had snapped a 14-month string of decreases through last August.
Wavesat announced that its “Odyssey” chipset is the first, and currently the only, to be widely deployed in Willcom’s new “XGP” broadband wireless network, which entered commercial service this month in Japan. Willcom’s data-only XGP service, based on a 4G “OFDMA” standard, is available to the general public and enterprise users. The 4G multi-core architecture incorporates multiple ultra low power DSPs, offering flexibility, high performance and low power consumption. The SOC manufactured using advanced Embedded DRAM technology requires no external memory, thus saving customers power consumption for very small form-factor. The Odyssey chipset is featured in Willcom’s GX001N XGP PC Cards manufactured by NEC.
While blitzing through the typhoon from one meeting to another along the JR Yamanote lines yesterday afternoon we stumbled across this groovy installation by Mediacure on the platform. Promoting the latest hot drink sensation – CoCo Presso, basically Hot CoCo flavored espresso – which has also been running what would have to be a rather expensive TV ad campaign.
Mildly interested, and certainly in need of a hot shot of something, upon entering the booth it was clear they were using the FeliCa tap & go call-to-action, note reader embedded beside the LCD screen on the last photo. Sure enough it loaded a crisp Flash mobile website offering a coupon for a quick discount on the product via the co-located vending machine, which of course is also NFC-enabled. The entire sequence of snapping the pix below and grabbing a jolt of sweet caffeine took like 90-seconds before our next train came along. Thanks to the folks at Meiji – this surprise treat really made our day!
