The folks over at Symbian Japan held their Symbian Summit 2006 event in the Tokyo Westin hotel yesterday. Sponsored by DoCoMo and — by the looks of the site — well attended (Japanese only), it would seem they have been improving the platform presence here with three more handsets rolling out recently from… DoCoMo!
Last week saw an interesting double play for mobile devices in Japan as both NTT DoCoMo and Willcom announced new phones — DoCoMo’s 7-Series — or new PDAs — Sharp’s oddly named W-Zero3[es]. These, combined with the continuing speculation on the this fall’s entry of RIM’s Blackberry email device (will it have Japanese text input capability?), made it a busy week for wireless watchers.
On Tuesday, WWJ was first on the Web with a full report and images of DoCoMo’s new 7-Series, a mix of models from Sharp, Panasonic, NEC and Mitsubishi, as well as from US maker Motorola…
DoCoMo today announced six summer 3G handsets, including ‘7-Series’ models from US maker Motorola, Sharp, NEC, Panasonic and Mitsubishi. The Japan-made models include three ‘designer’ phones, with ultracool shapes and colours conceived by noted Japanese design personalities, while Motorola joins the show with their M702iS and M702iG — the latter evidently based on the newest version of the widely popular ‘RAZR’ series, the Razr V3X.
The company unveiled the phones at a flashy press event held at the Harajuku Quest event space in central Tokyo. The three designer models, from Mitsubishi, Panasonic and NEC, offer a range of trendy colors including ‘lilac mirage’ and ’round coral’, and feature square, oval and bevel shapes based on the clam-shell form factor. DoCoMo’s choice of outside designers to create custom models is neither the first for the carrier nor for Japan and continues a popular (and lucrative) trend long developed by KDDI and Vodafone.
All phones unveiled today include, in varying mixes, the carrier’s stripped-down ‘3G-lite’ voice and data services, including roaming, ‘Chaku-moji’ (which lets the caller enter a short message that will appear on the receiver’s phone as it rings), network phonebook backup, network lock-out of a lost phone, Deco-mail (HTML mail), i-Channel and music playback. But while the carrier presented the phones as the unified ‘7-Series’, there are significant differences between the domestic and US models. The Motorolas fail to provide all of the signature lite FOMA services (lost phone lockout, PushTalk, removable memory) but they do roam, while the Japanese models don’t roam.
NTT DoCoMo has issued a press release stating that users of their 3G FOMA service surpassed the 2G Mova subscriber base as of 18 June. In fact, big D pulled into the lead for most 3G users per carrier in January and the over-all percentage of 3G mobile contracts in Japan became the majority in February.
We missed this PR yesterday from PacketVideo announcing their “collaboration with NTT DoCoMo to enable advanced mobile music services for the Japanese market using Microsoft Windows Media technology. The collaboration has resulted in the first-ever support of Windows Media Audio protected by DRM in NTT DoCoMo’s 3G FOMA handsets, powered by PacketVideo’s Universal pvPlayer media player. PacketVideo has long supported Windows Media in US mobile service launches and has provided i-motion player capabilities for more than 20 of NTT DoCoMo’s FOMA handsets.
To confirm, and as misstated in yesterday’s WWJ Newsletter under “NTT DoCoMo finally needs Microsoft”: the new handset equipped with Microsoft Windows Media Audio software and DRM is the F902iS, and not the N902iS. Sorry for the confusion (the links to the F902iS page were correct). Note, moreover, the item below, “Windows Live Messenger for DoCoMo…”
