Fujitsu
Fujitsu

Fujitsu

Renesas Ships Sample SH-Mobile G2 Chips

Renesas Technology Corp. today announced that it has begun shipping samples of the SH-Mobile G2, a single-chip LSI for dual-mode HSDPA/W-CDMA and GSM/GPRS/EDGE mobile phones. The LSI was jointly developed with NTT DoCoMo, Inc., Fujitsu Limited, Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, and Sharp Corporation, and evaluation samples have been shipped to these handset manufacturers since the end of September 2006. Renesas plans to begin volume production of the SH-Mobile G2 in the third quarter of 2007 and will offer the W-CDMA mobile phone platform worldwide to W-CDMA and FOMA handsets.

DoCoMo Aquires Fuel-Cell Stake

DoCoMo announced today they will form a business and capital alliance with Aquafairy Co. to develop fuel-cell products. DoCoMo will acquire an approximate 36.5-percent stake in the company through a purchase of newly allocated shares in the near future. Aquafairy, which develops and markets micro fuel cells for mobile devices, was established in Osaka in 2006 and has 11 employees. It has capital of 33 million yen.

In Praise of My Japanese Cell Phone

We just noticed this article by Brad Stone on the Newsweek website and smiled quietly to ourselves… he gets it! Nothing in the way of news there though – if you’re a regular WWJ reader – but for main-stream media consumers based in the U.S., it’s certainly one of the better pieces we’ve seen in some time. The obvious reason for accuracy therein comes from the fact that he actually spent a little time here in Tokyo on vacation this summer and had the chance to really test drive a great handset. While Brad’s item did miss on a couple of points (DoCoMo launched their DCMX mobile credit card service this spring with biometric fingerprint authentication capability on Fujitsu phones, for example), overall it’s refreshing to see a story without too much “Gee Whiz, Martha”-material about how people in Japan are using their cell phone to surf the web or send email.

Fujitsu Upgrades Fingerprint Sensor

Fujitsu Microelectronics and Phoenix Technologies recently announced that Fujitsu has introduced the latest member of its fingerprint sensor IC technology, the Fujitsu MBF320 Sweep Sensor. The new MBF320 features TrustedCore pre-boot authentication (PBA), fingerprint-matching algorithms and biometric software from Cogent Systems, and a USB 2.0 full-speed interface. According to the companies statement, a single, rapid fingerprint sweep across the MBF320 sensor captures fingerprint features associated with high-resolution, 500-dpi fingerprint data.

Fujitsu Announces Micro Mobile HDD's

Fujitsu has announced their first hard disk drives that use perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) to deliver enhanced storage capacity. The company unveiled its MHW2 BH-series of 2.5-inch hard disk drives for mobile PCs which will go on sale to the industry in October this year. The two PMR models are the 160GB MHW2160BH, which Fujitsu claims has the industry’s highest storage capacity for a 5,400 rpm HDD, and the 80GB MHW2080BH. The company aims to ship six million units of the two models.

Symbian Conference in Tokyo

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!