Japan’s mobile-phone shipments are forecast to rise this year, after gaining for the first time in three quarters in the period ended December, researcher IDC said. For all of 2005, shipments rose 0.5 percent to 44.32 million units. Sales of 3G handsets in the fourth quarter helped offset declines in the previous two quarters, fourth-quarter mobile-phone shipments rose 7.1 percent to 11.6 million units from a year earlier, IDC said.
According to PhoneScoop the FCC finally approved the NX9200 cellphone, the U.S. version of Casio’s popular G’zOne. The handset, which takes both styling and engineering cues from Casio’s G-Shock watch line, sports a Verizon logo in FCC documents. WWJ covered the launch here in May 2005 and said at the time “This could be a design winner should it land on US shores in time for the Christmas shopping rush.” Looks more like “almost in time for spring-break in Florida” instead!
Vodafone K.K. announced today that on 10 March 2006 it will commence nationwide sales of the Vodafone 904T, a new 3G handset by Toshiba. Vodafone K.K. will also simultaneously launch three new services and features with the sale of the Vodafone 904T: Vodafone live! CAST, a service that automatically delivers mobile magazine-like content to handsets, Vodafone Address Book, a service that lets customers back up their handset address books to a dedicated network server, and Deru Moji 3D Pictogram Display, which displays pop-up 3D animations in received mails.
NTT DoCoMo have just announced they have developed a 3G FOMA series called SIMPURE — a combination of ‘simple’ and ‘pure’ — comprising basic and compact handsets [.jpg] for people who do not require highly sophisticated functions. The series has two models, SIMPURE L, supplied by LG Electronics, and SIMPURE N, supplied by NEC. DoCoMo is positioning this series for use as second handsets for international travel as both models work on W-CDMA, GSM and GPRS networks.
For Vodafone Japan, the end came not with a bang, but with a whimper. When we arrived at last Monday’s press event – the final one, it turned out, before news of the Japan sell-out hit the Web – the smell of pending doom hung in the air. Ironically, the media briefing bore an optimistic title: the “Future Direction of Product & Service Development.” It was also surprising to see that President Bill Morrow and Chairman Tsuda-san would attend for the 3G roadmap briefing to be given by former J-Phone super-star Ohta-san; WWJ has never seen three Vodafone Big Guys in one room together for a media briefing (perhaps there is safety in numbers)? But when the talk from all three turned out vague and totally avoided any mention of new MVNO’s signing up to resell Vodafone 3G capacity — widely considered to be one of Big Red’s few viable options in Japan — we suspected something was up.
And when we learned that a $49 bn write-off had been announced by London on the same day, it was obvious that the clock had already started ticking down for the carrier’s long-speculated Japan exit. Thus ended, after some five years of trying, what could have been one of the most brilliant tie-ups between a global brand name and world-leading Japanese mobile know-how.
K-cab is a SMS-based service for calling taxicabs, which is available in Iwate prefecture. The service can also be used with QR codes that encode location information. Vending machines that bear such location-encoded QR codes are being installed in varous places in the prefecture so that people can easily call a cab just by taking a picture of a QR code with their camera phones and connecting to the K-cabs’ taxicab dispatch website.
