The current buzzword in personal electronics is Wi-Fi, but the full potential of the latest laptops, cell phones and PDAs is being held back by batteries that last just a few hours. Major consumer electronics firms like NEC, Toshiba and Motorola, along with a number of startups.. are working on micro fuel cells, which theoretically can generate power 10 times longer than conventional batteries.
Boasting camera phones, Japanese mobile phones are rapidly making inroads into the domestic market and secured a two digit market share alerting domestic companies. There are concerns that Korean companies set up strong bulwark as Nokia and Motorola, the no. 1 and no. 2 mobile phone makers in the world, pulled out of the domestic market or secured a paltry 3 ~ 4% outmaneuvered by home-grown major companies such as Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics and Pantech & Curitel.
China, the world’s largest market for cell phones, is aggressively developing a homegrown technology that can run the next generation of mobile telephone networks, challenging the traditional dominance of American and European companies. During the 1990s, as China spent $10 billion to build a national mobile telephone network, foreign companies reaped most of the rewards. Cisco Systems, Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia produced much of the equipment that runs the networks and many of the phones on them.
HI Corp, a mobile 3D rendering technology developer in Japan, and the Semiconductor Products Sector of Motorola Inc have agreed that HI will offer its Mascot Capsule Engine to customers of Motorola’s Innovative Convergence i.250, 2.5G GSM/GPRS handset platform. The HI technology is also scheduled to be available to Motorola’s i.MX applications processor customers and i.Smart smartphone reference design customers.
helloNetwork, the top developer of Java(TM)-based wireless streaming media technology, has partnered with Today Fast East Tone (FET), the third largest mobile carrier in Taiwan, to launch a new range of services which provide multimedia services to FET’s Bravo subscribers. These new services include downloadable movie clips and MTVs for a variety of different GPRS and JAVA enabled handsets.
Almost exactly 30 years ago, Motorola’s Martin Cooper, now regarded as the father of the modern cellphone, unleashed an entire industry when he made some of the first calls with a portable cellular phone in New York city. The rest, of course, is history – a lot of which is being written right here in Asian countries like Japan.
