IT researcher and consulting firm Gartner Japan has announced sales in Japan of cellular phones between January and June. Sales reached 22,133,100 units, down 8.5% over the same period last year. The company attributes the decline in sales to the fact that demand for camera phones was not as brisk as a year ago. Gartner also reports that W-CDMA phones accounted for almost 15% of total cellphone sales.
The Japan booth at ITU Telecom Asia 2004 is showing off a super-cool concept model by Panasonic, and we’re jealous..!!! No doubt they will have it on display here in Tokyo during CEATEC next month as well, and WWJ’s looking forward to taking a test-drive with video. Also on display: a few GSM models, made by Sanyo, which are apparently much more likely to roll-out overseas sometime soon.
Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd., best known for its Panasonic brand products, today unveiled five new models of DIGA DVD recorders. The recorders have 160- to 400-GB hard drives, providing massive recording and storage, high-speed dubbing, and superb home and mobile networking capabilities.
Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd., best known for its Panasonic brand of consumer electronic and digital communications products, today announced it has developed a new multimedia processor-based platform. The platform, that is to be applied to a wide range of digital appliances including mobile phones and audiovisual equipment, facilitates software development of digital consumer electronics and improves productivity and software design. The new platform can accelerate the speed products are introduced to the market by more than five times the current rate, develop higher sound and image quality, lower power consumption, fortify security, and enhance responsiveness.
Panasonic announced the release of it’s SDK MediaArtist, an MPEG-4 related AV software encoder for the 3GPP/3GPP2 and SD-Video standards, will go on sale Sept. 1st. Designed to operate with the SD memory card in target devices such as a cellphones, car navi systems, television, and camera models which are increasingly being adopted. Configured for the 3G phones of Japan’s wireless carriers and using the 3GPP standard, the original MPEG-4 object model has been significantly extended. Press Release in Japanese.
Symbian announced today the completion of the preemption process for the sales of Psion’s shares confirming that all the shareholders (except Samsung) were to exercise their rights. The real significance of today’s announcement is the clear roadmap, supported by a cash injection and an increase in headcout of 300 over the next 18 months, to drive the Symbian OS into mid-tier devices by, among other things, bringing down the bill of materials for the OS phone from today’s minimum of $132 to $78 by 2008.
