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3D Moji Mail – Icing on the Cake

3D Moji Mail - Icing on the CakeHere’s a quick video clip we shot at the Vodafone press conference when they introduced the new V804SS handset by Samsung — the first Samsung handset in Japan — going on sale here finally today. It has a few up-close examples of the company’s new dynamic email application, “Deru Moji” 3D Pictogram Display with pop-up animations, that we thought were pretty interesting.

While the functionality is only interoperable between a few handsets so far, this is a mobile mail nation and ‘cool factor’ really does count. Look for more discussion online about this next-gen offering — centered on when will it hit EU and US markets. Remember you saw it here first on WWJ!

Our 5th Birthday!

Our 5th Birthday!This week marked a major milestone for WWJ! In one form or another, I’ve been writing this email newsletter for five years — and what a five year term it’s been!

I spent a couple hours last night looking over past WWJ newsletters, and was struck by how much Japan’s mobile scene has changed. In 2001, when I started writing a weekly mobile-focused newsletter for J@pan Inc, i-mode had just celebrated its second birthday, KDDI had yet to roll out CDMA 1X services and the No. 3 competitor in the market was known as “J-Phone.”

Today, DoCoMo is far in the lead with their 3G FOMA service and music and TV are the new hot trends; i-mode itself has become almost dasai (uncool). KDDI have created one of the mightiest and most unified mobile platforms on Earth, with GPS-based blogging, shopping and PC Internet integration drawing huge usage. The company formerly known as J-Phone is about to become the company formerly known as Vodafone as Masayoshi Son attacks 3G mobile with the same successful discount focus with which he attacked NTT and home broadband.

Bonus ‘those were the days’ tidbits via the WWJ Newsletter after the jump!

NEC Looking for Global Partner

According to a story in the Daily Yomiuri, NEC’s next president Kaoru Yano told a recent press conference that “It’s bizarre that there are more than 10 cell phone makers in Japan. We’ll definitely go for a tie-up”, showing his enthusiasm for a rearrangement plan. Following the Nokia-Sanyo announcement and as mentioned in our Predictions for 2006, we are not surprised to hear about his plans for consolidation in the Japanese OEM market.

Japan Handsets Sales to Increase

Japan’s mobile-phone shipments are forecast to rise this year, after gaining for the first time in three quarters in the period ended December, researcher IDC said. For all of 2005, shipments rose 0.5 percent to 44.32 million units. Sales of 3G handsets in the fourth quarter helped offset declines in the previous two quarters, fourth-quarter mobile-phone shipments rose 7.1 percent to 11.6 million units from a year earlier, IDC said.

Guinness Book of Records for i-mode?

According to reports from local media, DoCoMo have applied to the Guinness Book of Records for its i-mode service as a result of the 70 million emails sent in one hour on New Year’s eve 2006. It is said that there has been no other instance when a single mobile Internet service provider has sent and received 70 million mails in one hour.

Yozan Expanding Tokyo WiMAX

In 2005, Airspan Networks signed agreements with Yozan Inc. to deploy a Tokyo-wide WiMAX network, valued at $16.7 million, to deliver high speed IP connectivity capable of a wide array of data service offerings. The companies has now announced a further $26 million expansion to their contract, bringing its value to more than $42 million. Airspan expects to deliver between $5 million and $8 million of the total in the first quarter of 2006, with the balance by July.

We have noticed plenty of outdoor ads for their BitStand brand here lately — Eds