FOMA
FOMA

Sony and NTT DoCoMo Form Joint Venture Co. for FeliCa Business

Sony Corporation and NTT DoCoMo, Inc. have agreed to form a Joint Venture Company to develop new services based on mobile phones equipped with Sony’s contactless IC Card technology FeliCa(R). The Joint Venture is targeted for establishment in January 2004. Discussions between Sony and DoCoMo will continue to finalize the details of this company which will be named: FeliCa Networks, Inc.

Oki Gets Animated with 3D Digital Avatars

Pick your disguise: I want to be Dr. Jekyll as my mini-me. WWJ was pleasantly surprised last week to find that one of Japan’s usually less-covered semiconductor companies, Oki Electric Industrial, has just come up with 3D digital avatar-producing software called FaceCommunicator-BBE that should allow mobile phone users to appear as a character that mimics (in real time) the user’s facial expressions (anger, doubt, happiness, etc.) during calls. Given Japan’s love of anime (think Pokemon), the software could be a real boon for those obsessed with being really cute – or those, for whatever reason, who don’t want to show their faces during videophone conversations.

KDDI WINs With Mobile Flat Rate; and Half-Price Calls to Mom

They’ve gone and done it now! KDDI’s just announced a double whammy; on November 28, the company will offer 3G’s first flat-rate packet services with all you can surf for 4,200 yen (about $37) on the souped-up, 2.4-Mbps (max) EV-DO version of CDMA 1X that KDDI has branded “WIN” (We Innovate the Next) – presumably to beat up on DoCoMo’s W-CDMA-based FOMA. Then, today, it said it was halving the cost of calls from KDDI Au mobile subscribers to KDDI ADSL/ IP home phones on the Dion Service. The knives are out! With three new service innovations, two new terminals, and a data card, the company appears to be following what Kenshi Tazaki, vice president and team manager of Gartner Research Japan, calls a “high risk strategy” (think of all those potential lost packet charges!). Will Big D respond in kind just as it was hoping to glean megabucks from FOMA users? “It’s a very aggressive shot at DoCoMo and stakes out a clear position by KDDI in the mobile market,” says Tazaki.

Viewpoint: 505iS or SOS call for 2G PDC?

Six months on from NTT DoCoMo’s largely successful counterattack – via the new 2G 505i handsets – on Vodafone’s Sha mail photo messaging service, the market-leading carrier has launched its next set of fab-five 505iS (S= second-generation) phones with working models, mockups, and three models (call girls?) – but, unfortunately, without the lovely Ai Kato (see 505i launch Viewpoint here). On top of entering the 2-megapixel camera war, the 505iS-series offer both JAN- and QR-standard bar-code reader capability (Cool! Get all your details in a flash!); a DoCoMo representative we interviewed gave strong hints that the 505iS may be DoCoMo’s final, or next-to-final, second-generation PDC upgrade. With the company seeking to emulate KDDI’s hugely successful push from 2G to 3G, migrating customers onto FOMA/W-CDMA in the latter half of next year is more vital than ever. As DoCoMo’s recent FOMA predictions arch up Chuck Yeager/stolen-Starfighter-like toward the stratosphere, or at least the top right of the graphs, what gives FOMA The Right Stuff? Is this the end of the road for second generation?

Wireless Watch at CEATEC; Next Stop Ubiquity

There was some real gold buried in the 2,460 booths and 505 companies that exhibited at the Combined Exhibition of Advanced Technologies (CEATEC) 2003 last week, and a bunch of press releases over the last two weeks have induced us to write a comprehensive tech review of what’s new with mobile technology. At the show we managed to corner the chief designer of Mitsubishi Electric’s next generation keitais (NGKs?) on a new series of very cool modular phones they have developed for next year, Melco looks to have made a conceptual breakthrough with these prototype handsets. Suffice to say we think that series with plug-and-play games console, megapix camera, GPS and other modules that snap onto it’s sleek clamshell design, looks as if they will blow the competition (Sony Ericsson and Samsung versions) out of the water. We also took a ride on the new Sanyo TV-Phone coming out for KDDI and saw a few other goodies like ASIMO and fish feeding with FOMA! We’ll show you all these cool new keitai in action, so be on standby for our video program that’s coming soon. The central message we took from CEATEC was that there are plenty of outstanding innovations coming on stream in the next 18 months that will finally herald the dawn of “ubiquitous” communication. Ahh, ubiquity, the means-anything buzzword that launched a thousand PowerPoint presentations…

CEATEC Japan: Mobile Phones Evolve in the Ubiquitous Era

The prime feature of the ubiquitous society is being able to access networks anywhere, anytime, and one of the leading roles in this society is being played by cellular telephones, which let users remotely control elements of lifestyle and entertainment, and link directly with people around the world through video and data communications. At CEATEC JAPAN 2003, visitors are experiencing the developing world of the cellular telephone.