3G FOMA 901i Launch
The 901i-series of 3G FOMA cell phones is DoCoMo’s latest tactical weapon in Japan’s escalating “lighter and smarter” mobile arms race. The four 901i handsets come packed with sophisticated go-go fun: twin stereo speakers and spatially enhanced sound; fat video and music files (500KB); pre-loaded games from Square Enix, Capcom and others; FeliCa smart-card e-wallet functions (in three models); 2-megapixel cameras; a TV guide for accessing TV program listings as far as eight days in advance (in one model) with genre and keyword searches including customized settings and registration for favorite TV shows plus it doubles as a remote control for TVs, DVD-Ds and VTR machines. Wow!
You can think of DoCoMo’s newest handsets as “901i lite.” The cell carrier hopes four, slim 700i handsets will sing and dance their way into ever-stingier consumers’ hearts and wallets. They are packed with would-be FOMA functionality minus the FeliCa e-wallet and could just provide a significant competitive advantage at a time when KDDI and Vodafone are still rushing to market with fully featured 3G battleships that command heavy-duty prices. Sometime-WWJ commentator Ken Gai’s take on the move is that Big D is merely launching a shrewd counter-attack on KDDI/au… and will use this series as launch pad to boost migration to 3G — perhaps even passing KDDI for total 3G subs by Christmas. But WWJ wonders: What else are they afraid of? The 700i-series handsets are packed with FOMA functions: Chaku Uta ring tones, Chaku Motion ring videos, Chara Den (character avatars that project the caller’s image during video calling), Deco-mail (HTML-formatted virtual stickers for decorating mobile email) plus a QVGA LCD screen, Java and Macromedia Flash applications. In fact, these cellys are almost FOMA in all but name.
In the mobile space, Asia is a huge, innovate-or-die marketplace, and MobaHo! — a joint venture of 88 Japanese and Korean companies — is gambling Big Money that Asians will want satellite TV and radio broadcasts beamed from the sky direct to their handheld receivers, cell phones and car-mounted tuners — and maybe even iPods in the future. Today, we go eye-to-eye with Mobile Broadcasting Corp. for a first-on-the-Web videocast featuring facts, analysis and great eye-candy of MobaHo’s latest digi satellite terminals.