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Au Blitz Unveils Seven New Handsets

KDDI has just held a press conference in the New Otani hotel to introduce another seven new handset models for the summer season just as the most recent batch announced earlier this year are now hitting the streets here in Japan. The new hardware on tap includes a Walkman branded model from Sony Ericsson and Casio’s follow-up to last years popular G’zOne water-proof ‘tough phone’ offering. They have also announced another Hitachi handset with the felica mobile wallet chip, a super-slim Kyocera coming in at 18mm thick with a 2.4inch ASV liquid crystal screen (and analog tv tuner), a new Toshiba ‘mass music’ model with bluetooth and 1GB memory on-board plus an additional digital TV tuner enabled unit (with PC site viewer) coming from Sanyo.

Sprint Introduces Espresso Mobile Phone

Consumers now have more choice in color mobile phones, as Sprint and Sanyo just announced the introduction of the SCP-3100 series. Available in four trendy colors, Pure Silver, Blue Energy, Always Pink, and the “hottest color to go mobile,” Espresso! According to Danny Bowman, vice president of product marketing for Sprint “Each family member can own the phone in a different color, making it easy to tell a child’s phone from a parent’s as you’re rushing out the door in the morning. Sanyo is the first in the U.S. to introduce the color Espresso in a handset.” [Funny, it looks sorta brown to us — Eds]

Japan Launches Digital TV for Mobile Phones

Japan Launches Digital TV for Mobile PhonesNHK and five commercial TV broadcasters held a splashy launch party in Tokyo’s central Shinjuku train station on Saturday afternoon, announcing the official start of terrestrial ‘One-Seg’ broadcast services. The carriers have lined up accordingly: NTT DoCoMo has partnered with Nippon Television and Fuji Television, while KDDI has forged a partnership with TV Asahi.

The new digital tuner-enabled handsets, coming from Panasonic, Hitachi and Sanyo, should deliver up to three hours of TV viewing time by processing and decoding only the requested channel — as opposed to current analog units which run only about an hour and eat more juice as they decode all incoming broadcast channels. Vodafone’s 905SH from Sharp is rumoured to be available just in time for the World Cup in June.

WWJ has been covering this story since the spring of 2004 when early prototype handsets were first introduced at an NHK open-house event.

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's Global Mobile Market Shrinks

Global mobile phone sales in 2005 rose 21 percent from the previous year to 816.6 million units, with Japanese manufacturers’ share shrinking from 2 to 1 percent, information technology research company Gartner Japan Ltd. said Thursday. Although Japanese-Swedish joint venture Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications AB’s share grew to the fifth-largest, total share by Japanese companies went down from the 2 percent level to the lower 1 percent.