Foreseeing that demand for 3G phones will get on track in Europe and North America this year, sparking competition with rivals in Japan, Samsung and LG are turning up the heat to market their new 3G models to customers in these regions. Mobile phone makers in Japan such as NEC, Panasonic, Sharp and Sanyo, which have concentrated on supplying W-CDMA phones to carriers in Japan, are also reportedly poised to focus more on global markets this year.
Following last week’s announcement that a number of companies in the space were working on so-called Super 3G, both Samsung and LG spoke up against the group, suggesting it was really an attempt by NTT DoCoMo to do an end run around efforts to settle on a 4G standard. Ed’s Note: Interesting that Samsung’s comment ignored Vodafone which was also one of the 26 companies on this group announcement.
NTT DoCoMo, Inc., Japan’s leading mobile communications provider, and Mobile TeleSystems OJSC, the largest mobile phone operator in Russia and the CIS, today announced that have formed an exclusive strategic partnership under which MTS will launch i-mode in Russia and other CIS countries. As a result of this agreement, i-mode will become available through 13 operations. This long-term agreement, signed today by these two leading mobile operators, will allow MTS to offer i-mode services to its in Russia via its GSM/GPRS/EDGE networks, with DoCoMo providing its brand name, know-how and technology. MTS plans to introduce i-mode in Russia before December 2005.
DoCoMo said today that this past summer they successfully achieved a 1-Gbps high-speed packet transmission (downlink) in a laboratory experiment using fourth-generation (4G) mobile communication radio access equipment, and are considering field experiments early in 2005. DoCoMo achieved 100- and 20-Mbps data rates in the downlink and uplink, respectively, in outdoor environments at a moving speed of about 30 km/h in July 2003.
Toshiba Corporation and NEC Corporation today announced two key advancements toward development of a magnetoresistive random access memory, a technology seen as key to the development of future generations of high performance mobile equipment. Unveiling the latest fruits of a joint development program dating back to 2002, the two companies announced a new cell design that halves power consumption during data writes and cuts writing errors, and a novel MRAM architecture with high speed characteristics and a performance that will support development of high-density devices. Full details of the new technology were presented on December 14 at IEDM (International Electron Devices Meeting) 2004 in San Francisco, USA.
ACCESS Co., Ltd., a global provider of mobile content delivery and Internet access technologies, today announced that its products will be available within the initial handsets selected by Telstra for the launch of i-mode. The profile deployment includes ACCESS’ NetFront browser, messaging client, JV-Lite(TM)2 Wireless Edition (a Sun-authorized Java client), SSL client and TCP/IP protocol stack. Handsets available for Telstra’s new i-mode service include NEC’s N410i and Panasonic’s P342i, with additional handsets to follow.
