Viewpoint
Viewpoint

Viewpoint

Vodafone K.K. Feb Subs Good & Bad

Vodafone Japan have released their February subscriber numbers to the media and there is good news and bad. The loss of 2G subscribers continued unabated from January, but 3G users still grew nicely (although not as much as in the previous month). The company reports 2G users shrank by 201,200 from 14,625,000 in January to 14,423,800 as of 28 February; 3G users grew by 148,000 from 527,300 in January to 675,300. Optimists will conclude that 3G grew by 28.1 percent month-on-month far outpacing 2G’s losses (which only shrank by 1.4 percent). Pessimists will conclude that Big V is still in a whole lot of trouble.

KDDI Opens Hip Harajuku Design Studio

Harajuku Design StudioKDDI has opened an Alpha Pup playland for its mobile universe right in the heart of Tokyo fashion central — Harajuku. Five floors of interactive phones and games, KDDI Designing Studio sits strategically at the mouth of Takeshita Dori at one of the area’s busiest intersections.

At the ribbon-cutting ceremony on 3 March, we listened to KDDI’s President Tadashi Onodera describing the strategy behind the choice of locations, saying the company has to synch with the needs and wants of its customers and their changing lifestyles: “It is Harajuku that draws the opinion leaders of Japan’s youth culture.” Youth culture is a prime focus for Japan’s top 3G provider. Their Chaku Uta Full music download system and EZ Game Street mobile gaming portal are exactly what the pediatrician ordered for young mobile slackers looking for portable fun. The company hopes a flood of trendy pop princes and princesses will wash through Designing Studio’s sliding glass doors, reaching out for KDDI’s cutting-edge techno fun as they flow on through.

Would You Store Cash on a Losable, Spamable, Stealable Celly?

It may look as though WWJ has been devoting too much editorial space to FeliCa coverage lately, but the fact is: FeliCa continues to be hot news. On Thursday last week, No. 3 carrier Vodafone announced they, too, had signed up to deploy Sony’s contactless payment technology on Big Red cellys, likely by fall this year. But I wonder if all Japanese consumers will be equally happy to store their hard-earned cash on a losable, spamable, stealable cell phone?

JR East, NTT DoCoMo, Sony to launch Mobile Suica handsets

Mobile SuicaMass transit meets mobile technology for Tokyo commuters in a new service enabling NTT DoCoMo FeliCa-equipped i-mode cell phones to function as Suica JR train commuter cards. The new service will combine DoCoMo’s FeliCa smart card e-money platform with the Suica IC train commuter card (both using technology developed by Sony) into one mobile handset that can simultaneously pay for train tickets, commuter passes, airline and movie tickets and purchases at any of 14,000 — and counting — retailers.

EZ Game Street: Watch Out, DoCoMo

EZ Game StreetKDDI rolls down EZ Street with an engaging new mobile gaming platform due to go live today. Designed for KDDI by Square Enix –- the gaming powerhouse behind the massively popular Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest franchises — EZ Game Street invites gamers to stroll rather than scroll down a cellular landscape of 350 games from 43 of the world’s top game makers, including Capcom, Disney, Koei, Hudson and Namco.

Text-based searches give it up for interactive icons in the new BREW-powered platform created for KDDI/au CDMA 1X WIN 3G phones. Users click on the icons for more info plus a sample of the game’s theme song. Admittedly, there is some initial text-bar crawling: users first click on “games” in the KDDI WIN menu to reach Game Street. There, the menu is divided into six choices: title, genre, new games, producer, randomizer and recommended. Click on any line and a colorful screen pops up decorated with familiar characters from each game -– up to nine per screen. Pick a character and click through the payment/subscription screen to play. Options include one-time game play, monthly subscription plus game information sites, online communities and game software sales.

Underwhelmed by DoCoMo's Next-Gen premini

DoCoMo’s first premini mobile was a tiny (90mm) stripped-down, no-frills 2G phone weighing a feather-weight 69 grams. Just out is its successor, the bigger and juicer premini-II, redesigned with a 1.3-megapixel camera, enhanced music elements, bar-code reader and memory stick. While the premini nicely occupied an open niche in Japan’s mobile ecosystem (as a second celly to use where cam phones aren’t allowed), it’s difficult to see what need the more full-featured premini-II fulfills. Manufactured by Sony Ericsson, the premini-II is slim, polished, weighs 79 grams, has 1.9-inch QVGA screen and comes in three colors: silver, black and brown. Given its beefier size (105 mm), it should probably have been called the pre-midi.