A large volume of English-language junk e-mails marketing male impotence drugs has been sent to domestic mobile phones from overseas since late last month. According to the Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry, unsolicited e-mails have been sent to mobile phones in Japanese before, but this is the first confirmed instance of English-language junk e-mails.
Boeing has announced it will abandon its Connexion unit providing high-speed Internet service on planes. Boeing said in June that it was reviewing the future of the service, which enabled passengers on Connexion-equipped flights to access the Internet over a satellite-based broadband connection. Only 12 airlines, mostly Asian carriers flying long-haul such as Japan Airlines, Singapore Airlines and Air China, had signed up for the service. In Europe, Lufthansa and Scandinavian Airlines had also subscribed. The airlines typically charged 30 dollars per flight or 10 dollars for 30 minutes of in-flight Internet access via satellite.
The LG L343i with i-mode on-board appears to be coming soon to O2 in the UK and in some other markets as well. It’s a low-budget GSM / GPRS unit and the handset spec. is very basic with a 128×160 pixel 262K colour TFT display, VGA resolution (0.3 megapixel digital camera) plus Bluetooth but no data card. Reminds us of the early i-mode days (circa 2001) here in Japan.
Mobile Research with goo, a project run by goo research and Japan.internet.com, announced the results of their Mobile Search study. 1083 mobile users in Japan participated in the poll, 43.4% male and 56.6% female. 78% answered that they browse web site using mobile phone, and 44% answered that they have clicked the ads on mobile search sites.
The folks over at Symbian Japan held their Symbian Summit 2006 event in the Tokyo Westin hotel yesterday. Sponsored by DoCoMo and — by the looks of the site — well attended (Japanese only), it would seem they have been improving the platform presence here with three more handsets rolling out recently from… DoCoMo!
QUALCOMM has announced the winners of the BREW 2006 Developer Awards, a global awards program that recognizes and promotes the best BREW applications created by wireless publishers and developers. The BREW 2006 Developer Awards — sponsored for the second year in a row by Motorola — recognizes wireless publishers and developers who are creating best-in-class BREW applications and services that are propelling wireless data to the next level. Japanese entries were awarded top honor in 3 of the 9 catagories.
