Satoshi Nagao, executive managing officer of KDDI, said: “We are already in an era of one mobile phone per person, so the market itself is saturated. To make the company grow in such a situation we have to increase our share of the market, by making other companies’ customers shift to us.”
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.
It’s rare for me to be Oh-My-God! impressed by mobile applications these days (blame it on George Bush and the endless beat of dreary war drums…), but the demo we saw was really terrific. The animations were great, the sound effects weren’t irritating (like they are with a lot of Java applets), and you could access pics of all the latest car models that slide onto the screen from the left or the right. If there’s a better way to sell cars via mobile, this may be it.
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.
WWJ sr. contributing editor Michael Thuresson, recently returned to Los Angeles to join the LA Business Journal editorial staff, sent in a user-level review of his new Sanyo handset that he uses on the Sprint network: The faceplate looks almost exactly like my old i-appli Panasonic DoCoMo model, but the thing is three times as thick and it is much heavier. This makes it hard to tuck the phone in my front shirt pocket – the left side of my shirt is tugged down by the weight. Based on my experience of trying to download ring tones, I have to say Sprint’s user interface is disappointing.
Britain’s first next-generation mobile phone network, 3, launches next month. So it seems like a good time to look at the lessons from the Japanese market, where 3G has been available for 18 months, and ask when we’ll really be enjoying the benefits of 3G in the UK.
