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Vodafone Launching Sharp 904

Vodafone K.K. has announced that it will commence nationwide sales this weekend of the Vodafone 904SH. This 3G handset by Sharp features the industry’s first VGA liquid crystal display, four times the resolution of current QVGA, making it possible to reproduce visuals and render small characters with more vividness and clarity than before. The model will also support new services and features, such as Face Recognition for enhanced privacy protection, Bluetooth and their Motion Control Sensor capable of measuring handset posture in all directions in 3D a popular function for mobile gaming.

Japan Launches Digital TV for Mobile Phones

Japan Launches Digital TV for Mobile PhonesNHK and five commercial TV broadcasters held a splashy launch party in Tokyo’s central Shinjuku train station on Saturday afternoon, announcing the official start of terrestrial ‘One-Seg’ broadcast services. The carriers have lined up accordingly: NTT DoCoMo has partnered with Nippon Television and Fuji Television, while KDDI has forged a partnership with TV Asahi.

The new digital tuner-enabled handsets, coming from Panasonic, Hitachi and Sanyo, should deliver up to three hours of TV viewing time by processing and decoding only the requested channel — as opposed to current analog units which run only about an hour and eat more juice as they decode all incoming broadcast channels. Vodafone’s 905SH from Sharp is rumoured to be available just in time for the World Cup in June.

WWJ has been covering this story since the spring of 2004 when early prototype handsets were first introduced at an NHK open-house event.

Bridging the Mobile Gaming Divide

Bridging the Mobile Gaming DivideDespite all the effort WWJ has put into finding and covering software developers that have successfully transitioned out of Japan’s navel-gazing mobile market to markets elsewhere, I must admit we haven’t found thousands. Or even dozens. But one of them is Shinjuku, Tokyo-based G-mode, and this week the Japanese mobile game maker and its Dublin, Ireland-based partner Upstart Games said four IQ-enhancing games, already popular in Japan, would be distributed in the US and Europe via Upstart. The news underscores the profits to be found when forward-thinking mobile players work hard to bridge the wireless culture divide.

Upstart’s CEO Barry O’Neil told WWJ that the company has been planning to launch a brain training game for mobile since the runaway success of the genre in Japan late last year. Ironically, the Irish side was initially skeptical that such a narrow niche could win operator interest in Europe or the US. “We’ve a relationship with G-mode dating back to last year, and their Right Brain Paradise was something we’d looked at in the past, but felt gaining operator support could be difficult. Now that the genre is becoming more widely known we felt the time was right to introduce this mobile series,” he wrote in an email yesterday.

The three-game series, dubbed, “I.Q. Academy” is intended to help get players’ brains in shape by offering games designed to exercise the brain’s right side and improve spatial, visual and cognitive skills in the player. I.Q. Academy is based on G-mode’s hyperpopular ‘Right Brain Paradise’ series, which, according to the company, has sold almost two million downloads. The series is expected to launch in Europe and the US in the coming months (WWJ subscribers log in for full article).

Vodafone Japan's Final Media Briefing: Out with a Whimper

Vodafone Japan’s Final Media Briefing: Out with a WhimperFor Vodafone Japan, the end came not with a bang, but with a whimper. When we arrived at last Monday’s press event – the final one, it turned out, before news of the Japan sell-out hit the Web – the smell of pending doom hung in the air. Ironically, the media briefing bore an optimistic title: the “Future Direction of Product & Service Development.” It was also surprising to see that President Bill Morrow and Chairman Tsuda-san would attend for the 3G roadmap briefing to be given by former J-Phone super-star Ohta-san; WWJ has never seen three Vodafone Big Guys in one room together for a media briefing (perhaps there is safety in numbers)? But when the talk from all three turned out vague and totally avoided any mention of new MVNO’s signing up to resell Vodafone 3G capacity — widely considered to be one of Big Red’s few viable options in Japan — we suspected something was up.

And when we learned that a $49 bn write-off had been announced by London on the same day, it was obvious that the clock had already started ticking down for the carrier’s long-speculated Japan exit. Thus ended, after some five years of trying, what could have been one of the most brilliant tie-ups between a global brand name and world-leading Japanese mobile know-how.

Vodafone K.K. Press Conference Blitz

This afternoon’s press conference at the swank Roppongi Hills Hilton saw Vodafone Japan putting on a brave face during a difficult news day for the global company. With five separate product announcements – links after the jump – and a good presentation from Ota-san, the famous director of their claimed-world-first photo-mail service, it will take us a day or so to sort through everything and file a more detailed story. While the 904SH handset with Sharp’s new VGA screen will get most of the main-scream headlines, some of the other things we saw were much more interesting… for better and worse (WWJ subscribers login for a peek at Vodafone’s concept TV phone that was also on hand without much fanfare).

Hardcore Mobile Gamer Dilemma

2005 was a big year for mobile gaming. $600 million big, or $1.5 billion if you want to talk globally. So where are all the mobile gamers? A quick visit around the busiest, most-trafficked gaming forums shows a mild interest in the mobile platform at best, and disdain for the medium at worst. It’s a given that the mobile platform will never generate the excitement and online chatter of the console or PC mediums, but why do hardcore gamers take such an apathetic stance towards mobile?