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GPS

Sanyo Rumored to Exit Handset Business

Sanyo, which is headed for its third straight loss this business year, plans to sell its cellphone operations as part of a new restructuring plan, the Nihon Keizai newspaper reported on Thursday. The business daily said Sanyo, which earlier this year issued $2.6 billion worth of preferred shares on very favourable terms to Goldman Sachs and two other financial institutions to ensure its survival, will also sell its semiconductor division. Sadakazu Shima, a spokesman for the Osaka-based electronics maker, declined to comment on the report.

UPDATE: Sanyo has denied the rumor and will disclose details of its reorganization when it reports first-half earnings on Friday.

SoftBank Mobile Reports Modest MNP Success

Japan’s mobile carriers aren’t in turmoil — not so far, anyway. But Mobile Number Portability (MNP) has brought the nearest thing yet to a consumer-facing market meltdown, and the No. 1 Agent of Change is undoubtedly Masayoshi Son’s SoftBank Mobile.

The media, industry analysts and Japan Wireless Watchers everywhere have been hit with two sets of numbers in the past fortnight: the initial, media-and-analysts-only post-MNP subscriber churn numbers released on 31 October (one week after MNP start) by NTT DoCoMo and KDDI (SoftBank Mobile was silent), followed by the regular monthly release of overall subscriber numbers issued on 8 November by the TCA Telecommunications Carriers Association; keep in mind that the TCA release is based on self-reporting from the carriers).

NTT DoCoMo Announces New 3G, HSDPA Phones

NTT DoCoMo Announces New 3G, HSDPA PhonesNTT DoCoMo, Inc. and its eight regional subsidiaries today announced 14 new 3G FOMA handsets, including the 903i-series, the ‘SIMPURE’ series and N902iL. All 11 new 903i handsets provide a wide range of entertainment functions, said the company. They are equipped for DoCoMo’s Chaku-Uta Full full-track music-downloading service. Five models can play tracks transferred from PCs that were used to download music from sites such as Napster Japan, which offers unlimited access to approximately 1.5 million downloadable tracks for a flat rate. HSDPA-capable models work with the Music Channel service, which enables up to two music programs to be downloaded automatically during the night, and the expanded i-motion video clip for downloading up to 10MB files. All models are compatible with Mega i-appli rich applications, and some are also equipped for “One-segment” digital terrestrial broadcasting.

The new 903i-series offer a number of improved conveniences for daily life. They have IC cards with triple the storage capacity of conventional models, and they come preinstalled with software required to use DoCoMo’s DCMX mobile credit card on DoCoMo’s iD platform. Six 903i models are equipped for the Keitai-Osagashi Service, a GPS service that enables a misplaced handset to be located with a PC.

V-Live to Become Y! Ketai

Softbank recently announced, in Japanese only, more information about their new branding strategy to take effect on 1 October. The SoftBank Mobile portal site will change from Vodafone live! to Yahoo Keitai!, while other Vodafone live! services will change to S! services – for example, S! Mail and S! GPS Navi; even V-appli will become S!-appli. We also noticed that all new handsets will include a Y! button (like DoCoMo’s famous i-mode shortcut key) that will take users straight to the Yahoo Japan portal and other Softbank services.

Japan 3G Beats the Hype – Lessons for European Cellcos

Japan 3G Beats the Hype - Lessons for European CellcosThe International Herald Tribune ran a couple of gloomy 3G-related articles last week (see “3G cost billions: Will it ever live up to its hype?” and “Operators in Asia learn from mistakes”). It’s the height of the summer vacation slow-news cycle, and maybe the IHT was just fishing for some headline attention, but we couldn’t let these egregiously faulty items pass without comment.

3G cost billions: Will it ever live up to its hype?

European mobile phone companies spent $129 billion six years ago to buy licenses for third-generation (3G) networks, which were supposed to give people the freedom to virtually live from their cell phones, reading email, browsing the Internet, placing video calls, enjoying music and movies, buying products and services, making reservations, monitoring health — all from the beach, the bus, the dentist’s waiting room or wherever they were.

But today, most people use their cell phones just as they did in 2000 — to make calls — and the modest gains 3G has made do not begin to justify the massive costs of the technology, which has strapped some mobile operators financially, bankrupted entrepreneurs, spurred multibillion-euro lawsuits against governments and phone companies, and sapped research spending.

Over the long term, 3G runs the risk of becoming the Edsel of the mobile phone industry — an expensive, unwanted albatross rejected by consumers and bypassed by other, less costly technologies, some experts say.

These articles are worse than merely wrong: they help fuel the flawed thinking and misguided strategies to which 3G license holders are addicted (helping cause the continued malaise). So widespread user apathy and risible revenues must prove that 3G’s a loser, right? Wrong. And to see why, you need look no further than Japan. Why have 3G carriers elsewhere in the world not realised: you don’t have to be DoCoMo to succeed like DoCoMo does.

WWJ paid subscribers: Log in for our 10-point rebuttal to the first IHT article (‘3G Hype’). Note: it’s a little long, so best to print out and read poolside!

Yamaha Announces Compass Chip

Yamaha Corp. announced that it has developed the YAS529 Three-Axis Geomagnetic Sensor IC Chip, the world’s smallest class of three-axis geomagnetic sensor for applications related to mobile phones and compact navigation systems. Most phones with GPS functions show the user’s current location on a map, but the services are thought to be difficult to use because the maps provided do not rotate in response to the user’s movements nor do they indicate the direction in which the users is moving. End users have expressed a growing desire for a geomagnetic sensor with an electronic compass function that keeps the map oriented in the direction of their movement. Plans call for beginning to market the chip in October 2006.