Would You Store Cash on a Losable, Spamable, Stealable Celly?
It may look as though WWJ has been devoting too much editorial space to FeliCa coverage lately, but the fact is: FeliCa continues to be hot news. On Thursday last week, No. 3 carrier Vodafone announced they, too, had signed up to deploy Sony’s contactless payment technology on Big Red cellys, likely by fall this year. But I wonder if all Japanese consumers will be equally happy to store their hard-earned cash on a losable, spamable, stealable cell phone?
You can think of DoCoMo’s newest handsets as “901i lite.” The cell carrier hopes four, slim 700i handsets will sing and dance their way into ever-stingier consumers’ hearts and wallets. They are packed with would-be FOMA functionality minus the FeliCa e-wallet and could just provide a significant competitive advantage at a time when KDDI and Vodafone are still rushing to market with fully featured 3G battleships that command heavy-duty prices. Sometime-WWJ commentator Ken Gai’s take on the move is that Big D is merely launching a shrewd counter-attack on KDDI/au… and will use this series as launch pad to boost migration to 3G — perhaps even passing KDDI for total 3G subs by Christmas. But WWJ wonders: What else are they afraid of? The 700i-series handsets are packed with FOMA functions: Chaku Uta ring tones, Chaku Motion ring videos, Chara Den (character avatars that project the caller’s image during video calling), Deco-mail (HTML-formatted virtual stickers for decorating mobile email) plus a QVGA LCD screen, Java and Macromedia Flash applications. In fact, these cellys are almost FOMA in all but name.