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.
Yamaha Corporation, the world’s largest manufacturer of musical instruments and a leader in digital audio, announced today that it will expand its “Ringtone@YAMAHA” ringing melody distribution service in China giving customers using CDMA mobile phones of China United Telecommunications Corporation (China Unicom) a vast choice of different melodies for their handset ringers. The service to distribute harmonic 16- and 40-tone ringing melodies nationwide will begin on July 1, 2003, permitting China Unicom CDMA mobile phone subscribers.
NTT DoCoMo, Inc. and its eight subsidiaries announced today that they will launch V-Live(TM) service for videophones beginning May 1, 2003. M-Stage V-Live is a one-to-many video streaming service that enables users to download or stream a variety of live and archived content via 64 Kbps circuit-switched wireless transmission. The new offering will be available for P2101V, P2102V, D2101V, SH2101V, and T2101V FOMA handsets.
Look how traditional chemical photo service providers have realigned themselves to handle digi prints; this is a new and growing line of business. With DoCoMo’s 505-series i-modes phones (due to hit the market early summer), handsets will have very high-quality, mega-pixel-class cameras, so cam-phone users will want to buy more of the services that digi-cam users have already been buying – like kiosk printing. And to those who would cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war I reply: cry freedom – and put a keitai in every back pocket.
The SD Card Association, a group of about 500 firms dedicated to the promotion of SD Memory Cards, on March 13 announced a new mini version of the cards. The smaller SD Memory Card, which has about 60% less capacity than current cards, will be used mainly in mobile phones for recording image data. Association member Toshiba Corp will market a version with a 32MB recording capacity in June and another with a 64MB capacity in July.
Last week, sr. contributing editor Michael Thuresson sent in a user-level review of his new Sanyo handset that he uses on the Sprint network. As you scroll through a list of tones, you cannot sample them before you buy them. Hard for people new to this idea to get interested if they can’t do that!
