Motorola
Motorola

Motorola

Casio Bullish on Overseas Handset Sales

Casio expects a 10 billion yen ($86 million) investment in new mobile phone models to return a profit in the first year, helped by sales of handsets equipped with its Exilim camera and G-Shock watch technologies. The handsets, based on the W-CDMA standard, will be sold at a higher profit margin than earlier models, said Tateki Ohishi, chief executive officer of Casio Hitachi Mobile Communications Co., the Tokyo-based company’s venture with Hitachi Ltd. Full Story Here.

Sanyo to Exit Cell Phone Business?

Sanyo has decided to sell its mobile phone business as part of its effort to improve group-wide profitability, with an agreement expected by the end of the year, according to a web report on Saturday by public broadcaster NHK. Sanyo is said to be negotiating separately with Sharp and Kyocera according to this article on The Japan Times. The exit rumor surfaced late last year.

LiMo Foundation Gaining Membership

The LiMo Foundation issued a statement [.PDF] to announce it has experienced a surge in membership as some of world’s most well-known mobile industry players have joined the Foundation during the past six months. Aplix, Celunite, LG Electronics, McAfee and Wind River have joined as Core members and will participate on the foundation board. Additionally, ARM, Broadcom, Ericsson, Innopath, KTF, MontaVista Software and NXP B.V. have joined as Associate members.

SoftBank Group to Trial Femtocell

SoftBank announced they have received a permit from the Ministry of Public Management, Home Affairs, Posts and Telecommunications to run femtocell trials. The experiment, using 2GHz belt, will be conducted in partnership with ip.access, Motorola, Alcatel Lucent, Ericsson Japan, Samsung, Sonas, Ubiquisys and NEC. Femtocell is a micro cellular phone base station that can be set it up in the home or office and offer mobile handsets voice services via existing fixed-line ADSL connections.

AOL Sells Tegic to Nuance

Nuance Communications and Time Warner announced yesterday they have signed a definitive agreement whereby Nuance will acquire Tegic Communications a wholly owned subsidiary of AOL and a developer of embedded software for mobile devices. Tegic brings industry-leading T9 predictive text input software, which has shipped on more than 2.5 billion devices, and next-generation integrated text and touch input solutions to Nuance’s portfolio of voice-enabled applications for device control, mobile search, email and text messaging.

DoCoMo to Sell Exclusive D&G Handset

DoCoMo just announced that the company will begin marketing (only via their Internet online sales channels and for a limited time) the exclusive special-edition M702iS DOLCE & GABBANA handset developed jointly with Dolce & Gabbana and Motorola. The designer model, which costs 75,000 yen (including tax), will be available for purchase via PC and i-mode Japanese language portals from 08:30 on April 20, 2007 until May 31 at 10:30 pm, or while supplies last.