Wireless News
Wireless News

Wireless News

ACG Gets Kyocera KX5 Slider

The Associated Carrier Group (ACG) and Kyocera Wireless announced the debut of the Kyocera Slider Remix KX5 wireless phone. The feature-rich, music-enabled handset is exclusively offered for a limited time by the recently united ACG, and is also the first phone offered by the alliance. “By forming the ACG alliance, our members collaborate with manufacturers – like Kyocera – to provide cutting-edge products, quicken market entry and to leverage costs,” said Greg Latour, president of ACG. “It’s proving to be a smart and successful alliance for our member companies, which ultimately benefits our customers. We are pleased to be the first in the U.S. to offer the Slider Remix.”

India, Japan to Sign Telecom Deals

India will sign three agreements with Japan, aimed at enhancing ties between institutions and industries of the two countries in the IT and telecom sector, in the first meeting of ministerial forum on ICT starting tomorrow. The ICT forum will also witness the signing of three separate MoUs by National Institute of Information and Communication Technology (NICT), Japan with C-DAC, C-DOT and IIT Guwahati, to undertake joint programmes in research and development and HRD in the ICT sector, an official statement said.

Sony Announcement Makes Cell Phone Manga News, Again

Sony Announcement Makes Cell Phone Manga News, AgainThanks to the folks over at AP Newswire and BusinessWeek, the recent announcement on Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc.’s plans to move into Japan’s mobile manga market is spreading like wildfire [Google] across the Web today. The Sony Corp. unit confirmed they have signed exclusive contracts with 10 popular manga artists, including Shigeru Mizuki, creator of Gegege no Kitaro. The company also stated plans to increase the number of titles now offered to over 300 by next year. That’s more than double the number offered by NTT Solmare and Toppan Publishing combined.

Wireless Watch Japan has been following the ‘Comic Surfing’ story since September 2004 with a video preview of CelSys’s mobile manga technology at Mobidec and again more recently with another video program from KDDI’s EZ Book launch event held in April this year. Sometimes dubbed the crowning jewel of the mobile entertainment content triple-play (games, music, manga), we have been bullish on this sleeping giant since first sight. Wonder how long it will take before Superman launches in the US?

Toshiba to Boost Memory Output

Japan’s Toshiba will invest 200 billion to boost output of flash memory chips used for mobile phones and portable music players to meet soaring global demand, a report says.The Japanese electronics giant will lift production capacity at its domestic chip plant to 150,000 units per month in 2007, up sharply from the current capacity of 10,000 units, the business daily Nihon Keizai Shimbun reported on Sunday.

FreeVerse Partners and Nihon Enterprise Release BREW Mobile Video SDK

Nihon Enterprise Co., Ltd., a mobile applications and content provider, and FreeVerse Partners, a technology incubation and development company, announce the release of their joint development effort; “MobileMovie Showdo”. Showdo provides BREW application developers a powerful toolkit to integrate video and audio into new and existing BREW applications. Showdo is based on TruVideotm, a high performance video CODEC, and includes a rich API that allows game and application developers flexibility in integrating video and audio into BREW applications. Performance of up to 15fps is noted on common ARM9 based handsets breathing new life and adding a new dimension of excitement to mobile games and video applications.

TIVR H.264 Video Decoder Software for Mobile Devices is Available for Licensing

TIVR Communications, a technology startup involved in development of high-performance, low–power multimedia software solutions for next-generation wireless handsets, today announced the release of H.264 Baseline Profile video software decoder optimized for Mobile/Handhelds. TIVR’s H.264/AVC decoder benchmark results show that Real-time (25 fps) decoding of QVGA (320×240) resolution H.264 Baseline Profile streams coded at 256 kbps is achievable on ARM9 based devices running at 220 MHz. Till now industry is struggling to provide 25 fps decode of QVGA resolution H.264 content on Mobile devices. TIVR’s AVC decoder makes it a reality thereby enhancing the experience of mobile users.