A recent report from the Nikkei reveals that Nintendo has licensed its properties for use as mobile phone content. According to this official Nintendo site [ in Japanese ], the service will be named Nintendo Mobile, and will begin on Japanese service provider NTT DoCoMo on October 17th, KDDI(au) on October 20th, and Vodafone on November 1st.
DoCoMo has just announced that Cellcom Israel, Ltd. will start marketing DoCoMo’s i-mode service in the Israeli market as of today. The service, which will be offered over Cellcom’s GPRS network, is the eleventh market for i-mode, following Japan, Germany, the Netherlands, Taiwan, Belgium, France, Spain, Italy, Greece and Australia. DoCoMo sees great potential for i-mode growth in Israel, with its national population of approximately 7 million people.
An extensive article in Wireless Week makes it clear that Motorola is only developing some Symbian handsets at the request of carrier partners “such as NTT DoCoMo”, which have invested in Motorola to keep the Symbian development going. Motorola’s primary OS emphasis is on its Linux/Java platform and Microsoft’s OS, neither of which is as expensive in royalties or implementation costs as Symbian, says Greg Besio, Motorola’s corporate vice president of mobile devices software.
NTT DoCoMo and Sony Ericsson have introduced a new concept model called the RADIDEN, claiming the world’s first cell phone that has been equipped with a three-band AM/FM/TV tuner. The handset incorporates a dual-front design: one side can be used as a cell phone, and on the other side is a radio designed for the 2G MOVA network. The radio features easy-to-select channels, a dedicated single-color sub-display (16.7×23.1mm), as well as visible buttons allowing the user to use i-mode while listening to the radio.
Yahoo Japan is an Internet superpower on personal computers here, but when surfers use the browser on their cellphone, that famed Yahoo logo rarely pops up. In Japan, the phone screen and the Internet content underneath is almost always controlled by the mobile carrier. But Yahoo and the other major Japanese portals, like Excite Japan, MSN and Goo, see that barrier breaking down, and they are investing heavily in their mobile phone content.
ITX E-Globaledge Corporation, NTT DoCoMo, Sharp Corporation and Waseda University have jointly developed IrSimple*1, a high-speed wireless communications protocol using infrared. IrDA*2 (Infrared Data Association), an industry organization that develops and standardizes specifications for infrared communications, has decided to formally adopt the protocol as its standard. IrSimple achieves faster data transmission speeds (at least 4 to 10 times faster than at present) by improving the efficiency of the current infrared IrDA protocol embedded in many mobile devices such as mobile phones. In addition, the IrSimple protocol also maintains backward compatibility with the existing IrDA protocols.
