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Oki Announces Safety Phone

Oki Electric has succeeded in developing the world’s first ultra small DSRC (Dedicated Short Range Communication) wireless module for embedding in mobile phones to be used for inter-vehicle communication systems. Using this module the company succeeded in trial production of the world’s first mobile phone, “Safety Mobile Phone” specifically designed to improve pedestrian safety. The Safety Mobile Phone notifies vehicles in the surrounding area of its location and retrieves the location information of vehicles in the surrounding area that are equipped with the DSRC system.

Veepers Powers Eshaberi Mail for KDDI

Pulse Mobile announced that the Veepers character animation technology will be pre-installed on all 2007 Summer “au” WIN branded phones from KDDI. Eshaberi Mail (talking mail) allows customers to create naturally talking avatar movies with lip synchronized animations by combining images such as photographs and illustrated characters. Users can also record their own voice which is used to drive characters’ animations.

New Spectrum to Encourage Competition

According to reports coming out of the Japanese media it appears that the communications ministry is leaning towards granting new spectrum licenses to Acca Networks Co. and Willcom Inc. to the predictable surprise and disappointment of the four existing operators. In an apparent effort to encourage more competition the ministry plans to allocate frequency by this autumn and expects the new services using the 2.5-gigahertz frequency band to start within three years after the licenses are granted.

DoCoMo Reports FYE 2006 Earnings

Market leader NTT DoCoMo has just released their accounting for the fiscal year ending 2006. Net income dropped to 457.3 billion yen ($3.8 billion) in the 12 months to 31 March, from 610.5 billion yen a year earlier, when earnings included a 102 billion gain from share sales of Hutchison 3G UK Holdings Ltd. and KPN Mobile. While sales climbed 0.5 percent to 4.79 trillion yen annual profit was down YoY by 25 percent based on increased handset subsidies and 3G network upgrade costs. DoCoMo also noted that ARPU in the fourth quarter fell to 6,530 yen from 6,720 yen a year earlier.

High-Quality Speech Coding for Mobile

DoCoMo just announced that it has developed speech coding technology, in collaboration with their research labs based in Palo Alto, which will enable better voice quality for mobile phones, yet only requires the low-level computing power of conventional mobile technologies. This new approach apparently targets a wider frequency range of 50Hz – 16kHz, which is approximately the full range of the human voice. By comparison, the frequency range of legacy services is limited to 300Hz – 3.4kHz. There’s a few fancy graphs on this .PDF to demonstrate the performance range.

eMobile Unveils SmartPhone & Flat-rate Price Plan

eMobile Unveils SmartPhone & Flat-rate Price Plan by Mobikyo KKeMobile announced their debut package offering – complete with terminals, data cards and flat-rate HSDPA price plan – today at a Tokyo press conference with company representatives joined by notable industry partners including Paul Jacobs, CEO of Qualcomm, Darren Huston, CEO of Microsoft Japan, and Masafumi Matsumoto, representative director from Sharp. The upstart carrier’s founder, chairman and CEO, Sachio Semmoto (who was co-founder of DDI, which became KDDI), called their newly introduced Sharp EM-One smartphone, “the next-generation mobile broadband device” – which was “designed to deliver always-on broadband at a reasonable monthly flat-rate price.”

The new Sharp terminal is bound to be popular with the same crowd who lined-up to get Willcom’s Zero3 model, also made by Sharp, in late 2005. The EM-One is a touch-screen qwerty-keyboard dual-slider device sporting a 4-inch LCD screen with Japan’s first WVGA (800×480)-resolution screen and Windows Mobile 5.0 (with all the typical office functions). At only 18mm thin, it even comes ready to watch 1Seg digital TV broadcasts and – according to the specs – the unit sports a Marvell PXA270 cpu running at 520MHz with 512MB of Flash memory and 128MB RAM. Perhaps most interesting are the rather agressive price plans, which bundle the device with fixed- and mobile-broadband connection services to attract new customers.

The company also announced four new data cards including a PC Card unit produced by NEC and a USB design coming from Huawei, which will run on the same high-speed network and tabehoudai all-you-can-eat billing model. The new services will be available starting 31 March in five major population areas including Tokyo, Aichi, Osaka and Kyoto. More details after the jump.