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kyocera

kyocera

Kyocera Cyclops on Virgin Mobile

Kyocera has announced a new handset for Virgin Mobile USA with two firsts for the carrier. The new Cyclops, as the handset is to be known, features Virgin Mobile’s TXT Tones and Virgin Audio Messaging, as well as other mid-range features and a sleek design. The Kyocera Cyclops also features a built in 1.3 megapixel camera, 65k color TFT LCD display, and 14MB of on board memory. Additionally, phone features like a speakerphone and voice-activated dialing are also included.

KDDI Launches New Handsets and 3G Services

KDDI - 12 New Handsets with Massive 3G Services LaunchKDDI today launched the first strike in Japan’s mobile number portability wars with no less than 10 press releases announced today at Tokyo’s ultra buttoned-down Imperial Hotel. The line-up of phones and services includes new units from Casio (W43CA), Hitachi (W43H), Kyocera (W43K and W44K), Sanyo (W42SA, W43SA and A5522SA), Sharp (W41SH), Sony Ericsson (W43S) and Toshiba (W45T and W47T), plus a new in-house designer model (also by Toshiba) code named Drape.

The accompanying new data offerings unveiled today include a scrolling news service (ala i-channel) and mobile video conferencing, the first such service from KDDI (which, until now, has philosophically posited that video conferencing was not suited for mobile), as well as several improved mobile music and digital TV offerings.

Kyocera to Share Research Costs

Kyocera Corp., which makes handsets for Carlyle Group Inc.’s Willcom Inc. and KDDI Corp., plans to boost profit by sharing research costs at its mobile phone and network businesses in Japan, U.S. and China, its president said. The company is creating a new unit to combine the businesses and shifting some development operations to India, President Makoto Kawamura said in an interview in Kyoto yesterday. The new unit will comprise of the company’s handset-making business in Japan, San Diego, California-based Kyocera Wireless Corp. and a cell phone business in China, Kawamura said.

Au Blitz Unveils Seven New Handsets

KDDI has just held a press conference in the New Otani hotel to introduce another seven new handset models for the summer season just as the most recent batch announced earlier this year are now hitting the streets here in Japan. The new hardware on tap includes a Walkman branded model from Sony Ericsson and Casio’s follow-up to last years popular G’zOne water-proof ‘tough phone’ offering. They have also announced another Hitachi handset with the felica mobile wallet chip, a super-slim Kyocera coming in at 18mm thick with a 2.4inch ASV liquid crystal screen (and analog tv tuner), a new Toshiba ‘mass music’ model with bluetooth and 1GB memory on-board plus an additional digital TV tuner enabled unit (with PC site viewer) coming from Sanyo.

Kyocera Net Profit Jumps 52%

Japan’s largest electronics component maker Kyocera Corp said its net profit in the year to March 2006 (FY05) surged 52 pct and it expects a further improvement this year thanks to a turnaround in demand for digital consumer products. Kyocera also pointed to a major improvement in profitability at its US cellular phone handset-making unit, Kyocera Wireless.

Kyocera Unveils Dual-Mode Prototype

Kyocera Wireless and Boingo Wireless announced the demonstration of a prototype Kyocera BREW-based dual-mode Wi-Fi/CDMA handset with integrated Boingo public Wi-Fi roaming at the CTIA Wireless 2006 trade show in Las Vegas. In a real-world setting, network operators and MVNOs can optimize the dual-mode handset’s application suite to automatically choose the appropriate mode, based on environmental and performance preferences.

Our 5th Birthday!

Our 5th Birthday!This week marked a major milestone for WWJ! In one form or another, I’ve been writing this email newsletter for five years — and what a five year term it’s been!

I spent a couple hours last night looking over past WWJ newsletters, and was struck by how much Japan’s mobile scene has changed. In 2001, when I started writing a weekly mobile-focused newsletter for J@pan Inc, i-mode had just celebrated its second birthday, KDDI had yet to roll out CDMA 1X services and the No. 3 competitor in the market was known as “J-Phone.”

Today, DoCoMo is far in the lead with their 3G FOMA service and music and TV are the new hot trends; i-mode itself has become almost dasai (uncool). KDDI have created one of the mightiest and most unified mobile platforms on Earth, with GPS-based blogging, shopping and PC Internet integration drawing huge usage. The company formerly known as J-Phone is about to become the company formerly known as Vodafone as Masayoshi Son attacks 3G mobile with the same successful discount focus with which he attacked NTT and home broadband.

Bonus ‘those were the days’ tidbits via the WWJ Newsletter after the jump!

Willcom Prepares for IPO

Japanese wireless service operator Willcom Inc., owned by U.S. investment fund Carlyle Group and Japanese electronics firm Kyocera Corp, will soon start choosing book-runners for its public share offering planned as early as next year, financial sources said. Willcom added 64,900 subscribers in February for a total of 3.8 million — an increase of 25 percent since March last year when it introduced the flat-rate voice plan.

Kids' Mobile Device for Willcom?

Reports in the Japanese business press have suggested that publisher Bandai Namco is about to announce the launch of a new mobile gaming device, which would be aimed at the children’s market and launched with mobile network operator Willcom. The new service, Kids Mobile, would be co-launched by Bandai Namco and Willcom, a Japanese mobile operator which was spun out of major operator KDDI in mid-2004, and is now co-owned by Kyocera and the Carlyle Group.