SoftBank has just issued a press release – together with HTC – indicating that High Tech Computer Corp. CEO Peter Chou and Vodafone KK President and Representative Executive Officer Masayoshi Son have signed a strategic collaboration agreement under which both parties will collaborate to develop and sell 3G PDA phones in Japan. According to the statement, products will be available as of late 2006.
Seems we were not on the VIP invitation list, at least NikkeiBP made it, to attend this recent Tokyo Fashion Show event featuring the latest styles targeted at Ginza shoppers here for fall 2006. However, the Sony Ericsson W43S was front and center with the all girl hip-hop group YA-KYIM on the catwalk singing their signature theme for the handsets new TV ad campaign.
NEC Electronics is looking for a sharp increase in profitability based on sales of platform ICs, particularly for mobile phones, according to CEO Toshio Nakajima. Last year, NEC Electronics had an 11 per cent market share in WCDMA baseband chips, behind Texas Instruments (TI) 42 per cent market share and Qualcomm’s 26 per cent, according to analyst iSuppli. Behind the plan is the development of platform ICs such as those envisaged by the recent Adcore-Tech consortium between NEC, NEC Electronics, Matsushita, Panasonic Mobile and TI.
Fujitsu Microelectronics and Phoenix Technologies recently announced that Fujitsu has introduced the latest member of its fingerprint sensor IC technology, the Fujitsu MBF320 Sweep Sensor. The new MBF320 features TrustedCore pre-boot authentication (PBA), fingerprint-matching algorithms and biometric software from Cogent Systems, and a USB 2.0 full-speed interface. According to the companies statement, a single, rapid fingerprint sweep across the MBF320 sensor captures fingerprint features associated with high-resolution, 500-dpi fingerprint data.
Fujitsu has announced their first hard disk drives that use perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) to deliver enhanced storage capacity. The company unveiled its MHW2 BH-series of 2.5-inch hard disk drives for mobile PCs which will go on sale to the industry in October this year. The two PMR models are the 160GB MHW2160BH, which Fujitsu claims has the industry’s highest storage capacity for a 5,400 rpm HDD, and the 80GB MHW2080BH. The company aims to ship six million units of the two models.
KDDI R&D Labs have developed a software only motion sensor function for their BREW driven OS handset fleet. Early motion-capable models, such as the V603SH for Vodafone by Sharp, required additional on-board hardware to calculate spatial information in order to perform operations simply by moving the handset up, down, left or right. According to the company statement potential applications include menu navigation, gaming and enhanced location mapping services.
