Motorola
Motorola

Motorola

Kyocera to Share Research Costs

Kyocera Corp., which makes handsets for Carlyle Group Inc.’s Willcom Inc. and KDDI Corp., plans to boost profit by sharing research costs at its mobile phone and network businesses in Japan, U.S. and China, its president said. The company is creating a new unit to combine the businesses and shifting some development operations to India, President Makoto Kawamura said in an interview in Kyoto yesterday. The new unit will comprise of the company’s handset-making business in Japan, San Diego, California-based Kyocera Wireless Corp. and a cell phone business in China, Kawamura said.

Japan 3G Beats the Hype – Lessons for European Cellcos

Japan 3G Beats the Hype - Lessons for European CellcosThe International Herald Tribune ran a couple of gloomy 3G-related articles last week (see “3G cost billions: Will it ever live up to its hype?” and “Operators in Asia learn from mistakes”). It’s the height of the summer vacation slow-news cycle, and maybe the IHT was just fishing for some headline attention, but we couldn’t let these egregiously faulty items pass without comment.

3G cost billions: Will it ever live up to its hype?

European mobile phone companies spent $129 billion six years ago to buy licenses for third-generation (3G) networks, which were supposed to give people the freedom to virtually live from their cell phones, reading email, browsing the Internet, placing video calls, enjoying music and movies, buying products and services, making reservations, monitoring health — all from the beach, the bus, the dentist’s waiting room or wherever they were.

But today, most people use their cell phones just as they did in 2000 — to make calls — and the modest gains 3G has made do not begin to justify the massive costs of the technology, which has strapped some mobile operators financially, bankrupted entrepreneurs, spurred multibillion-euro lawsuits against governments and phone companies, and sapped research spending.

Over the long term, 3G runs the risk of becoming the Edsel of the mobile phone industry — an expensive, unwanted albatross rejected by consumers and bypassed by other, less costly technologies, some experts say.

These articles are worse than merely wrong: they help fuel the flawed thinking and misguided strategies to which 3G license holders are addicted (helping cause the continued malaise). So widespread user apathy and risible revenues must prove that 3G’s a loser, right? Wrong. And to see why, you need look no further than Japan. Why have 3G carriers elsewhere in the world not realised: you don’t have to be DoCoMo to succeed like DoCoMo does.

WWJ paid subscribers: Log in for our 10-point rebuttal to the first IHT article (‘3G Hype’). Note: it’s a little long, so best to print out and read poolside!

SoftBank to Trial WiMAX

Motorola announced that the company has reached agreement with SoftBank for the deployment of a WiMAX (IEEE 802.16e-2005) trial network in Tokyo. Motorola will supply the end-to-end trial system including access points, an access network, and prototype WiMAX mobile handheld devices. Expected to begin in September 2006, the five-month trial will focus on performance of WiMAX in the 2.5GHz spectrum with regards to throughput and range, as well as the speed of network handovers between access points.

Symbian Conference in Tokyo

The folks over at Symbian Japan held their Symbian Summit 2006 event in the Tokyo Westin hotel yesterday. Sponsored by DoCoMo and — by the looks of the site — well attended (Japanese only), it would seem they have been improving the platform presence here with three more handsets rolling out recently from… DoCoMo!

Motorola and RIM Rolling in – SoftBank a No-Show?

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…

Motorola Razr, Designer Phones in DoCoMo 3G Summer 7-Series

Motorola Razr, Designer Phones in DoCoMo 3G Summer 7-SeriesDoCoMo today announced six summer 3G handsets, including ‘7-Series’ models from US maker Motorola, Sharp, NEC, Panasonic and Mitsubishi. The Japan-made models include three ‘designer’ phones, with ultracool shapes and colours conceived by noted Japanese design personalities, while Motorola joins the show with their M702iS and M702iG — the latter evidently based on the newest version of the widely popular ‘RAZR’ series, the Razr V3X.

The company unveiled the phones at a flashy press event held at the Harajuku Quest event space in central Tokyo. The three designer models, from Mitsubishi, Panasonic and NEC, offer a range of trendy colors including ‘lilac mirage’ and ’round coral’, and feature square, oval and bevel shapes based on the clam-shell form factor. DoCoMo’s choice of outside designers to create custom models is neither the first for the carrier nor for Japan and continues a popular (and lucrative) trend long developed by KDDI and Vodafone.

All phones unveiled today include, in varying mixes, the carrier’s stripped-down ‘3G-lite’ voice and data services, including roaming, ‘Chaku-moji’ (which lets the caller enter a short message that will appear on the receiver’s phone as it rings), network phonebook backup, network lock-out of a lost phone, Deco-mail (HTML mail), i-Channel and music playback. But while the carrier presented the phones as the unified ‘7-Series’, there are significant differences between the domestic and US models. The Motorolas fail to provide all of the signature lite FOMA services (lost phone lockout, PushTalk, removable memory) but they do roam, while the Japanese models don’t roam.