Nokia plans to locate its second global 3G equipment manufacturing site in China. By choosing China, Nokia will become the latest in a stream of major mobile telecoms gear makers – including Germany’s Siemens and Canada’s Nortel Networks – to build a 3G manufacturing facility in the country. Nokia already has a 3G research and development centre in Suzhou, the centre employs more than 100 engineers, and is “expanding” its headcount.
Nagoya Municipal Management Subway will make mobile phones based on the Personal Digital Communications (PDC) system and the cdma2000 system inoperative on trains and train platforms in August or September.
Opera Software today announced it will deliver Opera’s port for the BREW (Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless) application development platform with KDDI, Japan’s second largest mobile operator. “Opera’s full Internet browser offers the greatest advantage with the high-speed and efficient data communication capabilities of the 3G CDMA network,” says Dr. Seiichiro Sakai, Director, Product Management Department, Service & Product Planning Division.
NTT DoCoMo, Inc., Motorola Inc. and Motorola Japan Ltd. announced today that they have signed an agreement to jointly develop a FOMA handset targeting business users by taking advantage of high-speed 3G FOMA technologies. Commercialization is scheduled for spring 2005. The new handset, which is compatible with GSM/GPRS technologies, will be the first FOMA model that may be used outside of Japan. Unlike i-mode®-capable phones, the handset will enable access to the internet through mopera® or any other available internet connection service. What’s more, its browser will be able to display standard web pages. Full Press Release Here.
NTT DoCoMo Inc. and its eight regional subsidiaries announced that they will add English language capability to the i-mode® Disaster Message Board service beginning September 1, 2004. DoCoMo set up this electronic bulletin board service in Japanese last January, to be activated in the event of a major calamity such as a high-magnitude earthquake. The bulletin board will enable i-mode subscribers within the disaster area to post messages in order to notify family and friends of their personal safety and whereabouts. The service was launched in order to ensure communication and prevent a degradation in network performance, since an overflow of voice calls and data packet transmissions would likely follow a major disaster.
The Mobidec 2004 annual event is back for their 4th year, slated to run Aug. 26 – 27th in Tokyo’s Aoyama Diamond Hall. Discover the future for fusion of cybermoney, music distribution, rich contents, and broadcast. As the cellular phone and mobile web usage are increasingly expanding, this two day seminar will explore the affects of the wireless domain on the real economy. The key players in Japan’s cellular phone business and technology sectors will make presentations, and display company exhibits, of their unique experiance in this field.
