A regular WWJ reader who requested anonymity (for obvious reasons) send me a blast panning the new Toshiba BREW-enabled CDMA 1X handset. “Just thought you might be interested. I bought a A5304T with BREW last week, and it is crap! Actually, the BREW part and the camera are all right, and the phone design itself is nice; but the user interface and display suck.
Even mobile e-commerce – which has been a bust elsewhere – is starting to take off in Japan. More than a third of mobile Net subscribers have used their phones to buy such goods as CDs and concert tickets, according to the Mobile Content Forum, an industry trade group.
Japan’s largest newspaper Web sites get hundreds of millions of page views per month. But many new media pioneers are still unsure where news sites fit into the media mix in Japan — and whether they’ll ever make a profit. A man walks by a bank in Osaka just as it erupts into flames. He pulls out a camera-equipped cell phone — one of 10 million in use in Japan — and snaps a photo.
A man has been arrested after he used tear gas in a futile attempt to escape from a Tokyo video store where he had been caught filming up a woman’s skirt, police said Saturday. Police said that the man used his camera-equipped mobile phone to film up the skirt of a 20-year-old woman who was browsing through videos and CDs in the shop.
Japan’s domestic shipments of cell phones posted year-on-year growth for the second straight month in December, an industry body said on Thursday, as new-model camera phones breathed life into a saturating market. .
Berman warns, however, that with a typical handset cost of 37,000 yen in the latest quarter, “it will require about 23 months to cover [the] cost for upgrade customers.” He goes on to state that this creates a difficult situation for KDDI, wherein there’s lots of room for concern for the cost of the 2G-to-3G upgrade cycle. Remember, too, that KDDI has committed to launching a 1X EV-DO upgrade in late 2003. Will it have to commit to another two-year cycle to convert subscribers to the new system? If so, the expense half of their balance sheet may get a little out of control no matter how strong the revenue side remains.
Wherein WWJ staff line up a sexy, passion-red, brand-spanking new J-T08 from Toshiba- with a stunning LCD display – against a dowdy, dull-silver, two-year-old Panasonic P209iS in the handset grudge match of the year! We also toss a Sharp SH-52 camera phone into the ring… Japan’s pocket rockets have come a long way, baby, and it’s tough to beat the Tosh’s sleek lines, world-beating LCD screen, and silky smooth sound. Like their automaker brethren of a generation ago, does this lop-sided fight mean that Japan’s handset makers have mastered the art of ‘continuous improvement?’ We think so – and this program shows you why.
“Camera phone penetration is increasing. With the newest handsets – particularly in DoCoMo’s case – the packet downloads have just surged. So you’ve got much higher packet usage – two to three times higher now on the camera phones,” says CSFB sr. telecoms analyst Mark Berman. Watch our 2003 kick-off program as we pick the brain of one of Tokyo’s most respected industry watchers on what to expect in ’03. DoCoMo, KDDI, J-Phone, ARPU, data trends, and multimedia: these are a few of our favorite things!
Keisuke-san says his 2-1/2-year-old daughter is already interested in communicating visually on both mobile phone and on the set-top video system that he has in his SOHO office. “She sometimes says to me,’Dad, let’s do videoconferencing.’ I do not think that she understands the literal meaning of the words but she is kind of getting used to stand or sit in front of a monitor that shows a person talking on the other end of a live video call. She looks [like she’s] just enjoying it.”
Overall, I’m underwhelmed. Handset quality and clunkiness versus feature mix are widely considered to be major factors in the fizzling of FOMA to date. I think J-Phone will have to market like heck to convince people these are any better than current (great-quality) 2G models, and if DoCoMo launches better 3G models (as they are expected to do very soon), J-Phone could be in trouble.
