Motorola
Motorola

Motorola

Bitfone Expands Asia Operations, Relocates China Development Center to Beijing

Bitfone Corporation, the company that pioneered firmware over-the-air (FOTA) update technology for mobile phones, today announced it is expanding Asia Operations and has relocated the company’s China Development Center (CDC) to Beijing to support growing device management opportunities in the Asia Pacific market. This expansion includes the addition of Dr. De Ji, vice president of the CDC and Asia Pacific Professional Services, as well as increasing resources in Asia to 20 percent of Bitfone’s workforce.

Decuma becomes first company to join UIQ Alliance Program

UIQ Technology today announced the new partnership program, UIQ Alliance, which is targeting a chosen set of companies providing applications or services, based on the UIQ user interface. The UIQ Alliance Partner Program provides an increased choice of UIQ compatible technologies and knowledge that will be introduced to UIQ customers. “Members of the UIQ Alliance will possess diverse skills and experience, and deliver a variety of compelling technologies, products and services to the growing ecosystem built around UIQ,” says Johan Sandberg, CEO, UIQ Technology. “This will make it easier for mobile phone manufacturers to find good products and services supporting UIQ, which will be of high importance to the creation of a mass market for mobile phones based on UIQ”

New Year Gadget Shopping: Cell Phones that Look Like iPods

One of the best things about having a few days off over the holiday season in Tokyo is having time to wander casually through Akihabara and check out the latest gadgets. 2005 is shaping up as a showdown year for music-enabled portable devices and I couldn’t help but notice how DoCoMo’s new 3G handset, the SH901ic by Sharp, really does seem to have at least a slight style similarity to the iPod. As the network speed increases — and with flat-rate packet costs and improved handset technology — critical mass adoption by mainstream users buying even more data seems to be at hand. As competition increases, how will carriers, handset makers and content providers adapt their offerings over the coming year?

While it remains to be seen exactly what kind of applications and services will hit the streets, it has become increasingly clear that a race is on. Having both KDDI and Vodafone launch fixed-line access to content for mobile devices in Q42004 shows, at least in the mid-term, they are ramping up the business model to deliver larger-size files to end users. A little crystal-ball gazing for the coming year — and some very cool Akiba gadget photos — after the jump.

Hitachi Beats Samsung at KDDI – Comments

In a report on Unstrung, Justin Springham comments on the significance of this week’s KDDI contract awards to Korean and Japanese vendors (noted by WWJ here). Yesterday, Hitachi seemed to beat Samsung’s day-earlier deal with KDDI Corp., revealing that it had also secured a CDMA 1XEV-DO Revision-A network upgrade deal with the carrier worth approximately 100 billion yen. Springham writes that: “Hitachi’s win eclipses the earlier $800 million deal with Samsung. Reports suggested Samsung claimed to be the sole supplier of Revision A kit to KDDI.”

Business mopera Access Simple Launches in Japan

Today SEVEN announced it is powering NTT DoCoMo’s Business mopera Access Simple — a mobile groupware service that enables secure remote access to email, calendar, contacts, and documents via i-mode phones. Available today from NTT DoCoMo’s direct business sales force and NTT DoCoMo’s retail stores throughout Japan, Business mopera Access Simple is a tier-one i-mode service and is a core “i-mode for Business Solutions” offering. NEC and SEVEN partnered to develop Business mopera Access Simple; it is based on SEVEN’s “behind-the-firewall” Server Edition software.

mmO2 AND NTT DoCoMo ANNOUNCE AGREEMENT ON i-mode

mmO2 plc, a leading European mobile operator, and NTT DoCoMo, Inc., Japan’s largest mobile communications provider, today signed a long-term strategic agreement under which O2 will launch the i-mode mobile internet service in the UK, Germany and Ireland. This partnership will complement O2’s existing expertise in data services with DoCoMo’s experience in non-sms data and its extensive research and development capabilities. Customers will benefit from easy to use services, rich content applications and messaging across a range of advanced handsets.