3G
3G

3G

First Content for Vodafone live! CAST

Vodafone K.K. today announced the launch of content for Vodafone live! CAST, an automatic content delivery service scheduled to begin with the mid-March 2006 roll out of two new compatible 3G handsets, the Vodafone 904T by Toshiba and the Vodafone 804N by NEC. The visual mobile magazine “yubio” will debut as the first available content offering. “AkibaRun!” and “chu*rara” are scheduled to follow later in March. Yubio (based on a play on words using the Japanese word for thumb, which is oya-yubi) is a visual mobile magazine that readers can quickly flick through with their thumbs and targeted at males from 25 to 35 years of age. Yubio aims to be a visually oriented all-round entertainment magazine with set themes for each day of the week. Each issue, delivered daily, will have approximately 15 pages. (More details after the jump.)

DoCoMo Achieves 4G Field Trial

NTT DoCoMo, Inc. announced today that it achieved 2.5Gbps packet transmission in the downlink while moving at 20km/h. The fourth-generation (4G) radio access field experiment took place in Yokosuka, Kanagawa Prefecture on December 14, 2005. DoCoMo achieved a maximum 1Gbps speed in a similar field experiment on May 9, 2005. This time, by increasing the number of MIMO*1 transmission antennas from four to six and by using 64-QAM*2, data volume per transmission was increased from four bits to six bits. As a result, DoCoMo achieved a maximum speed of 2.5Gbps, which is faster than the International Telecommunication Union Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R)’s proposed standard.

Will it be SanyoKia or Nokia-San?

Will it be SanyoKia or Nokia-San? by Mobikyo KKLast week’s announcement of Nokia and Sanyo joining forces to boost their combined CDMA market share in the US was lost in the next-gen mobile TV hype and media avalanche (not to mention complaints about pokey dial-up access from the venue) coming from the 3GSM World Congress. The Nokia-Sanyo combination is an obvious play with both sides bringing a decent value proposition to the table; Nokia has massive manufacturing capacity, established distribution channels and a global brand while Sanyo has proven experience producing ultra-cool high-tech handsets and strong operator/vendor relationships. The companies gave no financial details of the tie-up, which is expected to close in the second quarter, but the JV will be based in Osaka and San Diego with an estimated 3,500 employees.

The challenge — and rewards — of morphing these respective ‘best of’ brands into a unified product offering are significant. Sanyo has advanced mobile battery and GPS chip expertise that even a Nokia would be hard-pressed to build on their own and such technologies are fast becoming key competitive differentiators as the US (and other markets) mandate emergency location reporting and other public safety services. Sanyo was vaulted to the ranks of top-tier suppliers to national champion DoCoMo last year as the name behind some of Big D’s first GPS-enabled models, the SA800i and SA700iS.

A Nokia-Sanyo tie-up makes sense from an economy of scale perspective and the end result should be better hardware for the end user, potentially at a lower price, which should please the operators and — more to the point — their shareholders.

KDDI Testing WiMax Network

KDDI just announced the results from their recent WiMAX trials held in central Osaka. The company has conducted the experiment to evaluate the performance of this system, in accordance with IEEE802.16e, and confirmed that practical use in an urban environment was possible. KDDI has charted the performance of this IP base “Ultra 3G” system as a wireless method to supplement exisiting 3G service with base station to radius coverage suitable for large city scale services.

DoCoMo Announces Nokia 3G Phone

DoCoMo announced today they will start selling the 3G FOMA NM850iG handset, made by Nokia [ .jpg image ], which works on DoCoMo’s 3G FOMA network in Japan and W-CDMA, GSM and GPRS networks overseas where DoCoMo’s global roaming services are available, beginning February 24, 2006. Application to DoCoMo’s WORLD WING 3G roaming service is required to use the handset overseas for voice calls, i-mode, videophone and short messaging service (SMS).The handset connects wirelessly with Bluetooth devices, including PCs for data synchronization and connection to the Internet.