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Panasonic Ships CCD-Killing Tech for Mobiles

With what might turn out to be impeccable timing, Matsushita Electric Industrial is shipping what Panasonic is touting as a breakthrough technology called nuMAICOVICON to replace CCD and conventional CMOS for camera loaded mobile phones. Imagine a technology that’s as cheap and cheerful on power consumption as CMOS, but delivers CCD quality, add in a good chuck of production and the Panasonic people could have a product that will save quite a few purchasing managers’ careers. This isn’t a future technology story: Panasonic are deadly serious. They have already started banging out about 2.2 million of the 1.3 megapixel version now, are adding a 2 megapixel version next month and want to ramp to 8 million units a month by October! WOW!

New DoCoMo 3G Handset Hits the Street: Fujitsu F900i

New DoCoMo 3G Handset Hits the Street: Fujitsu F900iLast December, DoCoMo unveiled its new 900i series phones in a splashy press conference at Tokyo’s Imperial hotel, and today, Friday Feb. 6, the first of that series, the Fujitsu F900i, hit the shops. The 900is, which Takeshi Natsuno calls “The best 3G phones in the world,” are ace when compared with the original FOMA phones. The 900is have 3X standby time (480 hours) and weigh 20% less than FOMA’s first models. In other words, the 900is are as good as DoCoMo’s 2G PDC terminals! The new Symbian OS based Fujitsu distinguishes itself with a finger print sensor and, like the other 900i models, a huge (100k) flash bucket. As you sit back and enjoy this video preview to our upcoming program of that launch event, note that DoCoMo is not saying when the other fab 4 are coming out.. yet. Full Program Run-time 2:55

Not Selling Sex on the Japanese Wireless Internet

We finally filmed the introduction to our latest video program – outside an establishment called “Sexual Harassment Corporation” – one of four or five adult industry vendors, including a brothel and a “Love Hotel” in a side street off the main drag, where prostitutes jump out and routinely proposition drunk salarimen (and the happily married author). There isn’t a station on the Yamanote line that isn’t crowded by similar scenes, and there there’s hardly a carriage on the JR line that doesn’t have, shall we say, full-blown advertisements for adult mags and manga that show Japanese girls seemingly as young as 14 flirting and flaunting themselves. Let’s face it, sex sells in Japan. Which brings us to wonder why Playboy.com is being blocked from the official Mobinet space.

Mobile Phones Enter 2-Mpixel Era

With the launch of Casio’s A5403CA for KDDI, Sharp’s SH505iS for DoCoMo, and our old friend the V601SH from Sharp to Vodafone, Japan has truly entered the 2-megapixel era. Beyond this, KDDI is planning A5502K with a xenon lamp flash unit this month. With two megapixels and onboard electronic flash, photography with mobile phones will make major inroads into digital camera territory.

3G Mobile Forum 2004 Conference Coverage

The difference between walking the walk and talking the talk was painfully clear at last week’s 3G Mobile Forum 2004 conference held but a home run away from Tokyo Disneyland’s Magic Mountain. The four-day event hit the airwaves running with a keynote from NTT DoCoMo’s Keji Tachikawa, who was able to reconfirm DoCoMo’s solid plans for FOMA through the year. But given the surplus of inertia that’s dragging 3G launches– actual and putative– the conference swayed on the tides of optimism and not a little understated recrimination between carriers, contents providers, business platform providers and engineers about the potential if not the reality of 3G outside of Japan, Korea and (possibly?) the UK.

This viewpoint hoists the petard on our exclusive video interviews with mobile phone inventor and 4G actualist Martin Cooper, who tells us about the potential and pratfalls of the wireless world as he sees them 30 years after he made that first call. We also have Playboy.com’s Markus Grindel telling us about the potential for adult content in the wireless environment, and last but definitely not least a high-paced program with prolific author and analyst Tomi Ahonen, a man who single-handedly lends a new meaning to ubiquity; he seems to be just about everywhere in the wireless space, and boy, is he always switched on. We’ll have this terrific triptych of programs up in the coming weeks, but first, let’s take a look at some interesting points at last week’s conference.

Fujitsu 3G Phones for EU in 2005

Fujitsu Ltd. is reported to be re-entering the European market with both 2- and 3G phones in 2005, according to a report in Japan’s Nikkei. Fujitsu’s last foreign foray overseas, in the United States, ended in 1997. The Nikkei reports that Fujitsu plans to develop dual-standard phones with France’s Sagem SA, with which Fujitsu signed a technology partnership agreement back in 2002. The new phones are reported to support both GRPS and W-CDMA.