From Monday, Seoulites can enjoy W-CDMA services at a similar rate to the current 2G phones. In an effort to build awareness of 3G phones, the private and public sectors are taking part in various incentives. SK Telecom’s subscription fee is 50,000 won, and it will collect 20 won for 10-second voice calls in addition to 14,000 won in basic monthly charges. SK will offer video call services for free in March, but will charge a monthly fee to be fixed later.
NEC Corp. is stepping up design and development of advanced cellular telephones with the formation of a joint venture with a Chinese technology company. The Tokyo-based company will take a 30 percent stake in Step Technologies (Beijing) Co. Ltd. with China’s TechFaith Holding Ltd. owning the remaining 70 percent. The company has been capitalized at 50 million renminbi ($6 million).
NEC has begun marketing “MM GATE,” a software tool that converts image data to formats supported by a wide variety of mobile devices, including cellphones, car navigation systems, and PDAs. Ideally suited for use by mobile content providers, the new software automatically identifies the types of mobile terminal to which an image should be sent, and adjusts the format, size, and resolution of the picture, enabling content providers to transmit the optimized image of a single picture to various types of devices.
Toshiba Corp and Fujitsu Ltd each have developed a new mobile phone with connectivity based on “Bluetooth,” a technology specification for short-range radio links, and received the Bluetooth logo certification needed for their sales of the phones. Their movement is believed to be directed at the Japanese market. There are not many Bluetooth-enabled cell phones in the Japanese market — Sony Corp launched the “C413S” in 2001 and Sharp Corp already offers a PDA terminal and a PHS terminal based on Bluetooth.
Signaling its seriousness to get its HSDPA (high-speed downlink packet access) network and concomitant mobile/smart phones up and transmitting in 2005, NTT DoCoMo said today that it is plowing 37 billion yen ($343.8 million) into 5 Japanese handset and network builders AND Motorola Japan Inc. What is immediately surprising about this move is that once again, as with yesterday’s media extravaganza on the new 900i phones, long-term handset partners Toshiba, and handset maker and major infrastructure builder Sony Ericsson are both missing. But it now looks like DoCoMo feels its time to start really kicking in the efficiencies to differentiate itself from KDDI’s WIN service both in terms of performance and, more critically, to faster recoup the considerable investment the company has made in 3G as it probably gears up for a packet price war with KDDI and Vodafone KK. And then, there is the leveraging of Motorola’s Linux links too!
“This is just the beginning,” Takeshi Natsuno, Managing Director of DoCoMo’s i-mode Planning Department, told Wireless Watch of the new flagship 5 FOMA 900i handsets that DoCoMo showed today and that should be released in or around February 2004. Before about 600 journalists, Natsuno’s message was that, after two years of battling battery/bulk problems, here finally, were 3G phones capable of 2G performance in terms of standby time and weight. But beyond this, DoCoMo has clearly worked hard to differentiate the phones from being more than “Super 505i” and hinted that the company was considering lowering data packet rates to compete with KDDI WIN and Vodafone K.K.’s recent Happy Packet rate cuts. But wow! What’s loaded in the the new fab 5, for example 500 Kbytes of gaming capability will be inevitably be the Final Fantasy for gamers (the game appears to be preloaded) and a real nightmare for competitors. Natsuno san, not known for being shy on stage at these sort of events, seemed to speak from the heart when he called the lineup the “best mobile phones in the world!” The critical question for DoCoMo, however, is differentiation from the already all-singing, all-dancing 505 series, and quite a few of our doubts were answered. But questions also remain. We’ll have a video program on the show, the phones and the figures behind the models up soon. Before that, here’s some of the upgraded low down on the fantatabulous 900is. And THEN there are the P900iV and the F900iT.
