It seems that Taiwan’s High Tech Computer Corp. (HTC) will soon set up a branch office in Japan, paving the way for the company to support their debut on DoCoMo announced earlier this year. The Japan office location would be HTC’s newest overseas foothold; the company has already set up branches in Europe, the U.S., and Hong Kong. HTC is the world’s largest manufacturer of cell phones that run on Microsoft’s Windows operating system.
The pending Japan arrival of Research in Motion (RIM)’s hyperpopular BlackBerry email device, widely known as the ‘CrackBerry’ for its simple, efficient and addictive delivery of corporate email, will inject a new dimension into this country’s complex device and service matrix.
A wise move or a sign of desperation? These two viewpoints seem to characterize media, pundits’ and bloggers’ responses to last month’s announcement that DoCoMo would bring the BlackBerry email device into Japan, in partnership with RIM, based in Canada. Our own take on it was: Who Cares? WWJ was mindful that “virtually everyone in Japan’s workforce already has an always-on, fully connected email device right in their back pocket — in other words, a phone!”
Furthermore, before and since then, there has been more news, helping make it even more difficult to assess the BlackBerry’s prospects.
According to the pundits, NTT DoCoMo’s decision to import the BlackBerry is either (a) a master stroke aimed at securing the giant carrier’s corporate mobile offerings as 3G competition heats up in 2006/07, or (b) expensive folly that will see enterprise sales teams saddled with a clunky, ‘not-made-here’ device that competes poorly if at all against universal 3G phones that already receive push mail in real time, thank you very much (and some media reports have stated the first Japan BlackBerrys won’t even accept Japanese text input). The truth, however, is probably somewhere between these extremes, and so WWJ went straight to the source.
Last week saw an interesting double play for mobile devices in Japan as both NTT DoCoMo and Willcom announced new phones — DoCoMo’s 7-Series — or new PDAs — Sharp’s oddly named W-Zero3[es]. These, combined with the continuing speculation on the this fall’s entry of RIM’s Blackberry email device (will it have Japanese text input capability?), made it a busy week for wireless watchers.
On Tuesday, WWJ was first on the Web with a full report and images of DoCoMo’s new 7-Series, a mix of models from Sharp, Panasonic, NEC and Mitsubishi, as well as from US maker Motorola…
Willcom, Microsoft and Sharp have introduced their next generation smartphone. The Zero3 [es] is powered by Intel’s PXA270 CPU at 416MHz, with 128MB of flash memory and 64MB of SDRAM. In addition to the Windows Mobile 5.0 (Japanese) operating system, the phone also comes with the Opera mobile browser and Flash pre-installed. It has a 1.3-megapixel camera, miniSD removable memory, a USB 2.0 port and QR code reader. According to the press release, they are working on seperate W-Fi, Bluetooth and 1Seg TV tuner cards to be released at a later date.
We missed this PR yesterday from PacketVideo announcing their “collaboration with NTT DoCoMo to enable advanced mobile music services for the Japanese market using Microsoft Windows Media technology. The collaboration has resulted in the first-ever support of Windows Media Audio protected by DRM in NTT DoCoMo’s 3G FOMA handsets, powered by PacketVideo’s Universal pvPlayer media player. PacketVideo has long supported Windows Media in US mobile service launches and has provided i-motion player capabilities for more than 20 of NTT DoCoMo’s FOMA handsets.
NTT DoCoMo, Inc. and Research In Motion (RIM) announced today that DoCoMo will start marketing RIM’s BlackBerry handheld devices to its corporate customers in autumn 2006. The BlackBerry handheld devices to be sold in Japan will operate on both W-CDMA (UMTS) and GSM/GPRS networks and will be useable around the world for voice and data communications. BlackBerry Enterprise Server software tightly integrates with Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus Domino and Novell GroupWise, and enables secure, push-based wireless access to e-mail and other corporate data.
