digital-tv
digital-tv

digital-tv

Welcome to Japan's Wireless Frontier

Welcome to Japan's Wireless FrontierCurrently in it’s 11th year, Wireless Japan is evolving from Japan’s largest wireless & Mobile network technologies and services trade show into one of the largest in Asia. This event has become the hub of wireless dedicated gatherings in Asia with over 150 exhibitors and 30,000 attendees expected. Running July 19 – 21 at the space-age Tokyo BigSite exhibition center the annual event is attended, and endorsed, by most of the major players in mobile.

WWJ was on the scene, as usual, we have video interviews with Qualcomm about their new MediaFlo digital tv efforts and a hands-on demo with HTC’s new smartphone coming soon from DoCoMo. We also attended the Mobile Entertainment Forum session this afternoon and will have some of the presentations from that coming online as well. Meanwhile here’s a quick peek at some of the sights and sounds from the show floor today and links to our coverage from the event in years past.

Brazil Adopts Japan Digital TV Standard

Brazil has selected a HD digital television system based on a Japanese standard for its more than 120 million television viewers, instead of the standards used in Europe and the United States. President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on Thursday signed a decree authorizing the use of the Japanese standard in a ceremony attended by Japanese Communications Minister, Heizo Takenaka. The new system is expected be operational within seven years and the transition to digital television from the current analog model will occur over 10 years, the presidential press office said in a statement.

NEC Announces New LCD Module

NEC LCD Technologies, Ltd. today announced that at SID 2006 in San Francisco it will give a presentation and demonstrate a sample of its new 3.5-inch color quarter video graphics array amorphous-silicon TFT liquid crystal display module boasting a viewing angle and contrast ratio of the industry’s highest class for small liquid crystal display modules. This new LCD module was realized by a combination of super-reflective natural light technology, NEC’s proprietary transflective technology for adapting objects to outdoor light.

Au Blitz Unveils Seven New Handsets

KDDI has just held a press conference in the New Otani hotel to introduce another seven new handset models for the summer season just as the most recent batch announced earlier this year are now hitting the streets here in Japan. The new hardware on tap includes a Walkman branded model from Sony Ericsson and Casio’s follow-up to last years popular G’zOne water-proof ‘tough phone’ offering. They have also announced another Hitachi handset with the felica mobile wallet chip, a super-slim Kyocera coming in at 18mm thick with a 2.4inch ASV liquid crystal screen (and analog tv tuner), a new Toshiba ‘mass music’ model with bluetooth and 1GB memory on-board plus an additional digital TV tuner enabled unit (with PC site viewer) coming from Sanyo.

World First Mass-producible Polymeric UWB Antenna

Omron announced that it will introduce a new SMD Polymeric Antenna for short-range, wireless Ultra-Wideband (UWB) applications. Product launch is scheduled for June 1, 2006. UWB is a recently commercialized short-range wireless technology, expected to be widely adopted in consumer goods. Applied in dongles, personal computers, printers, mobile telephones, digital televisions and DVD players, UWB functions as a low-power-consuming wireless USB (universal serial bus), allowing users to transfer large amounts of data rapidly between various devices in close range.

Japan Launches Digital TV for Mobile Phones

Japan Launches Digital TV for Mobile PhonesNHK and five commercial TV broadcasters held a splashy launch party in Tokyo’s central Shinjuku train station on Saturday afternoon, announcing the official start of terrestrial ‘One-Seg’ broadcast services. The carriers have lined up accordingly: NTT DoCoMo has partnered with Nippon Television and Fuji Television, while KDDI has forged a partnership with TV Asahi.

The new digital tuner-enabled handsets, coming from Panasonic, Hitachi and Sanyo, should deliver up to three hours of TV viewing time by processing and decoding only the requested channel — as opposed to current analog units which run only about an hour and eat more juice as they decode all incoming broadcast channels. Vodafone’s 905SH from Sharp is rumoured to be available just in time for the World Cup in June.

WWJ has been covering this story since the spring of 2004 when early prototype handsets were first introduced at an NHK open-house event.