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NeoMtel CEO Paul Kim to Speak at 3G Mobile World Forum

On January 13 at the 3G Mobile World Forum 2005, NeoMtel Corporation CEO Paul Kim will present the streamed session A : 3G content, services, applications, focusing on killer mobile graphic applications and Korean case studies. NeoMtel, the professional company in part of mobile multimedia solution, will be demonstrating the latest mobile multimedia technology, VIS 2.0 in the own booth (No# 22) where attendees can see how the latest mobile vector graphic technologies can be applied to eye-catching mobile services.

3G Competition Heating Up

Foreseeing that demand for 3G phones will get on track in Europe and North America this year, sparking competition with rivals in Japan, Samsung and LG are turning up the heat to market their new 3G models to customers in these regions. Mobile phone makers in Japan such as NEC, Panasonic, Sharp and Sanyo, which have concentrated on supplying W-CDMA phones to carriers in Japan, are also reportedly poised to focus more on global markets this year.

New Year Gadget Shopping: Cell Phones that Look Like iPods

One of the best things about having a few days off over the holiday season in Tokyo is having time to wander casually through Akihabara and check out the latest gadgets. 2005 is shaping up as a showdown year for music-enabled portable devices and I couldn’t help but notice how DoCoMo’s new 3G handset, the SH901ic by Sharp, really does seem to have at least a slight style similarity to the iPod. As the network speed increases — and with flat-rate packet costs and improved handset technology — critical mass adoption by mainstream users buying even more data seems to be at hand. As competition increases, how will carriers, handset makers and content providers adapt their offerings over the coming year?

While it remains to be seen exactly what kind of applications and services will hit the streets, it has become increasingly clear that a race is on. Having both KDDI and Vodafone launch fixed-line access to content for mobile devices in Q42004 shows, at least in the mid-term, they are ramping up the business model to deliver larger-size files to end users. A little crystal-ball gazing for the coming year — and some very cool Akiba gadget photos — after the jump.

Hitachi Beats Samsung at KDDI – Comments

In a report on Unstrung, Justin Springham comments on the significance of this week’s KDDI contract awards to Korean and Japanese vendors (noted by WWJ here). Yesterday, Hitachi seemed to beat Samsung’s day-earlier deal with KDDI Corp., revealing that it had also secured a CDMA 1XEV-DO Revision-A network upgrade deal with the carrier worth approximately 100 billion yen. Springham writes that: “Hitachi’s win eclipses the earlier $800 million deal with Samsung. Reports suggested Samsung claimed to be the sole supplier of Revision A kit to KDDI.”

Hitachi Wins 3G Order from KDDI

Hitachi said it has won a contract worth over US $800 mn from KDDI Corp. for 3G wireless communications equipment. “We can’t give you specific figures, but the size of the contract exceeds the US$800 mn order KDDI awarded to South Korea’s Samsung Electronics yesterday,” said Hitachi spokeswoman Naoko Okada.

Korean Wireless Broadband Confusion

Following last week’s announcement that a number of companies in the space were working on so-called Super 3G, both Samsung and LG spoke up against the group, suggesting it was really an attempt by NTT DoCoMo to do an end run around efforts to settle on a 4G standard. Ed’s Note: Interesting that Samsung’s comment ignored Vodafone which was also one of the 26 companies on this group announcement.