It’s been a rather hectic few weeks here, as mentioned at the end of our latest WWJ Newsletter, so we thought a chocolate covered bundle of tidbits would be in order today. With 3GSM running this week in Barcelona, on top of the usual post January speed cycle, we’ve clipped over a dozen highlights together for a sweetheart ‘Valentines Eve’ post chalk full of wireless news goodies collected over the last little while, just for you after the jump.
NTT DoCoMo just announced it has achieved a maximum packet transmission rate of approximately 5Gbps in the downlink – claiming a World’s First – using 100MHz frequency bandwidth to a mobile station moving at 10kmh. The field experiment 4G radio access took place in Yokosuka, Kanagawa Prefecture on December 25, 2006. After having achieved a maximum speed of 2.5Gbps in December 2005, DoCoMo doubled the speed in the more recent test by increasing the number of MIMO transmitting and receiving antennas from six to 12 each, and by using proprietary received signal processing technology.
It was the best of times, it was… well, it really was the best of times! Also, as the famous line from Dickens goes, it was the age of wisdom, the age of foolishness and the season of.. Mobile!
Looking back on 2006, it’s hard to decide which news from Japan’s mobile scene was the most spectacular. Vodafone pulled out, Softbank stood up, mobile number portability struck, a record number of new handsets hit the street and – as December winds down – Motorola and Samsung are shipping first foreign-made 3G units into Japan.
A ‘quick’ look at what caught WWJ’s attention in ’06 after the jump.
Toshiba announced the global launch of the latest addition to its new series of high-capacity SDHC Memory Cards: the industry’s first 8-gigabyte Class 4 memory card. The new card will be introduced in early January 2007, alongside the 4GB products launched in September, and will give Toshiba a larger commercially available lineup in high performance SD Memory Cards. The SDHC (SD High Capacity) Memory Card is based on the SD Card Association’s SD Specifications Ver2.00, which defines high capacity, high performance enhancements to market-leading SD Memory Cards. The new card meets the Class 4 standard, a speed standard that requires a data write speed of at least 4GB/second. Toshiba is first in the industry to announce the launch of Class 4 8GB SDHC memory card.
According to a recent report, DoCoMo is testing a new network standard that could send DVDs to handheld devices in about 10 seconds! The prototype uses a combination of Multiple In Multiple Out (Mimo) technology and a tweaked version of quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) and is capable of delivering 2.5Gbits/sec to users travelling at 20Km per hour. Mimo, which is used in a the draft 802.11n Wifi standard and turbo versions of existing Wifi products, uses a combination of several antennas and clever processing to boost data rates.
According to a press release from KDDI/au today, the company has just announced a new handset, the W43T [.jpg] from Toshiba. Also just announced: this Toshiba unit will incorporate the company’s new 3D Navi GPS service functions and that both will be introduced to the market starting in late April. This latest CDMA-1X unit also offers LISMO mobile music and touts a 3.2-megapixel camera, although it does not have a 4GB HDD, like the recent W41T, or the mobile commerce ‘FeliCa’ chip.
