Looking to spread its wireless world into Asia, QUALCOMM Monday said it has signed a non- binding memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Asia Pacific Broadband Wireless Communications (APBW), the first operator in the region to commercialize 3G services using CDMA2000 technology.
KDDI Corporation and Okinawa Cellular Telephone are pleased to announce the release of the A1304T (manufactured by Toshiba Corporation) and the A1401K (manufactured by Kyocera Corporation) as part of a new 3G (CDMA2000 1x) lineup, enabling data transmission of up to 144kbps. Both support MovieMail, enabling users to capture and send seamless movies. The two new handsets are scheduled for sale from the beginning of August.
Fujitsu Limited and Nokia today announced that they will cooperatively develop and provide end-to-end mobile solutions and services for enterprises utilizing Nokia’s range of business terminals and platforms and Fujitsu’s wide range of capabilities in consulting, systems integration and managed services. The companies will provide secure, easy-to-use horizontal and customized vertical mobility solutions and services for companies that want to take advantage of mobility to increase efficiency, reduce costs and improve business processes. Initial rollouts will start immediately in the Nordic region and the UK, with expansion into selected regions of EMEA and Asia Pacific anticipated in the early part of 2004.
KDDI and Okinawa Cellular Telephone will launch ‘Premium EZ Payment’, a new payment collection service where charges for purchases of products through participating online shopping sites are invoiced to end users monthly together with their au cellular service charges.
KDDI Corp. and Okinawa Cellular recently announced plans to launch five new handsets from the end of May increasing their new lineup of 3G mobile phones (CDMA 2000 1x), a format that enables high-speed data transmission of up to 144 kbps. All the new phones are Movie Mail-compatible, a function that allows users to shoot and send seamless movies. The new handsets scheduled for launch are the A5401CA manufactured by Casio, the A5402S produced by Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications, the A5306ST and A1303SA both made by Sanyo, and the A5303H II manufactured by Hitachi.
Disney Internet Group is not expecting its US operations to approach its success in Japan anytime in the near future, one of their executives told me. The guess here is that things will change when color phones saturate the market. One in every three cell phones in the US will have a color display within 6 months, according to Seamus McAteer at Zelos Group, a San Francisco-based technology consulting firm.
So far, Japanese carriers haven’t really pushed location services as stand-alone products; they’re sold as “part of” a handset and there are no handsets that are sold only as, or primarily for, navi-service capabilities. Sure, KDDI did do a big marketing push when their first GPS-enabled keitai hit the market in December 2001, but now it’s just one more feature onboard their fleet (in the January catalog, KDDI showed six of 11 handsets as having GPS capability). Also: Looks like Japan’s WLAN market – in addition to being highly fragmented – is one of the cheapest.
After a two-year business strategy planning pause, BREW finally launched in Japan last month. From the consumer point of view, BREW and Java work more or less the same: you navigate a menu, select an application, download it, then run it. There’s little to chose on a technology basis. But BREW – like 3G – may be able to gain a leg up on Java (DoCoMo’s favored choice) if KDDI can continue to roll out cool, fun, cheap, feature-laden (and BREW-enabled) handsets – much as the carrier has done with 3G. Now that KDDI has finally rolled out BREW, we wonder how competition with Java will unfold in 2003? Ironically, BREW’s future may be intimately tied up with that of 3G.
The past couple of weeks saw two lavish events at trendy Tokyo venues hosted by carriers NTT DoCoMo and J-Phone to fete their content provider communities (so, yes, there was a lot of overlap in the guest lists). One attendee at the J-Phone event, held at Zepp in Odaiba, reported that it was a sweaty, raucous evening with content community punters packed in six deep. “There was a lengthy line-up of folks waiting to exchange meishi business cards,” she said, adding that a good time was had, evidently, by all.
Last week, sr. contributing editor Michael Thuresson sent in a user-level review of his new Sanyo handset that he uses on the Sprint network. As you scroll through a list of tones, you cannot sample them before you buy them. Hard for people new to this idea to get interested if they can’t do that!
