Terminal Technology
Terminal Technology

Terminal Technology

Epson and SANYO to Merge Liquid Crystal Businesses

Seiko Epson Corporation and SANYO Electric Co., Ltd. have announced that they would merge their liquid crystal businesses to form a new company. The new company will be known as SANYO EPSON IMAGING DEVICES CORPORATION and is planned to begin operations in October 2004. Epson will hold 55% of the joint venture, and SANYO 45%. The new entity will aim to become a leading manufacturer of small and medium-sized LCDs for mobile phones, digital cameras, and for use in automobiles.

Fujitsu, Mitsubishi Forge 3G Handset Alliance

Here’s one for the books: Symbian OS proponent Fujitsu and Mitsubishi (which makes decent handsets for the domestic market but is unknown outside of Japan) have announced that they are getting together to develop new FOMA handsets. The press release today appears to be dressed up in terms of Fujitsu offering its expertise to Mitsubishi with Symbian, but it also hints that the two will combine on hardware development too. Given the fact that Fujitsu is a leading proponent of Symbian, and that DoCoMo president Keiji Tachikawa hinted that Symbian will be the OS of choice, the announcement looks as if Mitsubishi has figured the lay of the land and jumped on the bandwagon.

Panasonic Introduces the X300 Cell Phone to Europe

Panasonic Mobile Communications Co., Ltd., introduces the unique X300 to the European market. Designed with a one-push pop-up screen, the X300 is the first phone of its kind. The tri-band phone also features a 65K colour screen, video record and playback capability, polyphonic ring tones, Multimedia Messaging (MMS) and built-in camera. Mr Masatoshi Kitade, Managing Director, Panasonic Mobile Communications Europe, comments: “The X300 is an exciting addition to Panasonic’s product line up. Its innovative, pop-up screen design transforms a high-quality mobile phone into a digital camera. With the capability to shoot short video clips as well as still shots, the X300 is at the cutting-edge of mobile technology. We are proud to be the first to offer a phone of this design, continuing our tradition as pioneers in the industry.”

Epson and Renesas Develop New Open-Standard for the Mobile Video Interface

Seiko Epson Corporation and Renesas Technology Corporation have jointly developed standard specifications for the Mobile Video Interface, a high-speed serial interface designed specifically for text and graphics displayed on mobile communications devices. Now that they have completed the new standard, the two companies have decided to make it an open standard. Epson and Renesas Technology believe that the dissemination of the new standard will ensure even simpler architecture for the high-speed data transmissions required of next-generation mobile equipment such as mobile phones.

First Bluetooth & BREW 3G Phone

KDDI and Okinawa Cellular Telephone are pleased to announce an addition to their new high-speed 3G mobile handset lineup. The new A5504T by Toshiba, available from mid-April, is the first handset to merge BluetoothTM with BREWTM applications, and comes with a mega pixel camera, web-authoring software, multi-media output functionality, EZNavi Walk compatiblity, and data transmission speeds of up to 144kbps.

Fujitsu FOMA 3G Foulup

Apart from being $12.8 billion in debt for reasons they possibly don’t understand, Fujitsu’s FOMA foray has fumbled as DoCoMo announced today that the Feb. 6 released Fujitsu 900i has a software problem that affects nearly 70,000 of the handsets sold so far. (Is that ALL of them?) The handsets, according to DoCoMo may have “difficulties in automatically receiving incoming e-mail under certain circumstances….” for example, when you want to read them, perhaps?