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SoftBank Mobile Summer Handsets

SoftBank Mobile announced their handset lineup for the ‘Summer of 2007 Sales Battle’ which will be available from the beginning of June. According to the company press release the 12 new 3G models are focused on style, quality and individuality, see the dedicated Flash site [in Japanese] Here. We note six handsets are coming from Sharp, including the 913SH slider while the upstart telco claims a scoop for the first deployment in Japan of Windows Mobile 6 on two of the units from HTC. Toshiba added three models with Samsung and Panasonic each contributing one. More details after the jump.

Mobile Monday Tokyo Demo Night Video

A Totally Vivid User Interface - Video DemoThe recent MoMo Tokyo event, held 23 April at KDDI’s Designing Studio, featured a mobile mash-up of presentations in the super-cool Demo Night format – which has been popular in other chapter cities. For Demo Night, a line-up of interesting mobile companies were allowed a 5- to 7-minute show & tell session for their mobile content or service offering – displayed on an actual handset and projected on the big screen for all to see. We’ve posted video of all six presentations for those of you who were unable to attend in person.

Tracey Northcott, VP at Enfour Group demonstrated Camera Jiten a native Brew dictionary application for instant scanning of English words giving their Japanese translations. Mandali Khalesi, CEO of Naviblog, showed-off how to find the closest Guinness with your mobile phone. David Collier, founder and CEO of Pikkle, demonstrated a new type of full-screen mobile flash service they provide to enable rich social networking. Nobuyoshi Noda, Mobile Division Deputy GM of Adways, gave an overview of the Mobile Affiliate Advertisement Smart-C product. Tim Smith, Director of Freeverse Consulting, introduced Malibu IVP, a middleware approach to creating useful and viable 3G videocall applications and Hiroshi Oda, VP Corporate Communications from CIAJ, announced that CEATEC JAPAN 2007 will launch a new special exhibit area under the theme of Digital Contents for their annual trade-show in October.

KDDeye Camera Phone Image Wall

Here’s a super slick offering for AU camera-phone otaku’s. KDDI has launched this new Flash-based image wall [.jpg] in somewhat stealth mode as we just happened to stumble across it by accident recently. Simply put, members can upload their photos, or short video clips, from their handset or desktop PC. They also provide an easy cut & paste java script for those who hope to see their content appear in the rotating loop and so bloggers help spread the word. As part of the companies popular Duo-Blog service it’s yet another great example of youth targeted community based products which clearly is having a positive impact on their monthly new subscriber additions. Nice one!

Sharp Announces New Mobile AQUOS

Sharp announced they have developed a new LCD, based on ASV (Advanced Super View) technology found in the companies AQUOS line of TVs, for mobile handsets which features the industry’s highest (as of April 17) contrast ratio of 2,000:1 with a wide viewing angle of 176 degrees and a high-speed response time of 8 ms. According to the statement, by September 2007 the company will start shipping samples of this new 2.2-inch at 240 x 320 (QVGA) screen, targeted for 1Seg digital-tv enabled cell phones in Japan. Sharp started this trend with their 902SH model for Vodafone Japan in 2004 and their popular 905SH cycloid style design launched here in June last year, just in time for the World Cup. They have since followed-up with the so-called “2nd model” 911SH.

SoftBank Mobile – New Flagship Store

SoftBank Mobile - New Flagship StoreWith the flurry of activity around here lately we are somewhat behind on rolling out this quick video clip shot at SoftBank Mobile’s new Flagship store in Harajuku. Wisely located in Tokyo’s mobile youth grand central, and mere blocks away from KDDI’s Designing Studio, the company was handing out chocolates (a nice touch for Valentines day) and even had a few SoftBank Hawks baseball team personalities in the house to help celebrate their New Open launch event.

While Kitty-chan was apparently not available to promote her newly announced Swarovski Crystal handsets there was a good selection of the latest super sparkle designs, under glass, front and center. Of course the colorful 812SH Pantone series by Sharp were also easy to spot, however, for the most part there was not much in the way of selection for live working models on offer. That being said it’s certainly better than this Virtual Life SoftBank Mobile shop and hopefully the company will get more test-drive units on display in the future. As for our first impressions; it’s a definite improvement, in both size and location, when compared to the Vodafone’s earlier Megastore attempt in Shibuya several years ago.

Mobile Manga on BusinessWeek

BusinessWeek posted a good op-ed, by Kenji Hall, about the Manga for Mobile market niche in Japan. WWJ has been covering this evolution ever since Mobidec back in 2004 [video here] and it’s nice to see the concept is finally starting to get some air-time overseas. Manga is a natural content to port for wireless devices here and obviously this simple concept to render text and images, for whatever print media is popular in any given region, makes sense. Note; we also had a fantastic presentation from Digital Garage at Mobile Monday Tokyo in Feb. 2006.

Is Mobile 2.0 Really Just Hype?

Paul Golding at Wireless Wanders posted an interesting op-ed about the hype surrounding mobile 2.0. While it’s clear that he’s looking at this from a Euro/US perspective – especially on the device side – however, we have no doubt there are some valid points contained therein. At the same time it should be also noted that Impress R&D (div. of the major Tokyo-based publisher) released a book last summer called Mobile 2.0 [in Japanese] which would likely shed a little more light on what is actually possible, at least in Japan.

Disney Launches Mobile Social Network

Disney Launches Mobile Social NetworkWe’re thrilled to see Walt Disney Japan step into the mobile social networking space in March with this announcement [in Japanese only] for their public launch — on all three carriers’ official portals — of Wonder Days. In the most simple terms it looks very much like Habbo Hotel meets Mickey Mouse, however you need not take our word for it.. watch WWJ’s first-to-web video demo. and see for yourself!

It’s no surprise that many of the popular and established fixed-line service offerings have been making the leap onto Japan’s wireless web. Tokyo-based DeNA has several perfect examples for auctions and social networking with Mobaoku and Mobage-town respectively. Moba (game) Town is a free service, and available only on mobile, which has attracted just over 3 million members since it’s launch last summer. The hook was to provide free games, with over 30 titles to choose from, supported by advertising and micro-purchases — using MobaGold — for premium avatars. In the same way that instant messenging and presence of friends applies to online products (like the Twitter craze) it’s easy to see the evolution of mobile communities connecting anywhere and anytime will become a defacto standard for the next-generation.

DoCoMo's i-channel Hits 10mln Subs

Adobe just announced that DoCoMo’s i-channel news and information service, powered by FlashCast technology, has surpassed 10 Million subscribers in Japan. DoCoMo hit this important milestone just 18 months after the launch. The rapidly expanding data service is delivered through 25 channels to almost 20 percent of all NTT DoCoMo customers. i-channel allows subscribers to automatically receive five basic channels, including news, entertainment, weather, horoscopes and sports.

EZ News Flash Hits 1 Million Users

KDDI has announced the number of users for their EZ news flash service exceeded one million people
on Saturday, February 17 this year. EZ news flash launched on Thursday, September 21, 2006 as an
information delivery service, weather news for example with BCMCS to deliver instant and updating multicast information to the standby screen of subscribers mobile phone. The service charges a small information fee while data charge is free.