Chip design company SyChip Inc. is testing software for its SDIO (secure digital I/O) WLAN card so it can be used to add Wi-Fi capability to smart phones. With the card and the software, smart phones can use a WLAN to transmit data and double as a cordless VoIP when linked to a corporate IP telephony service, said Navi Miglani, SyChip’s director of marketing.
Japan is famous for cool camera-phones and its massive vending machine industry, put them together and you’ve got a significant business opportunity. We visited Pinchange Co. Ltd, and got a step-by-step demo. of their lean, mean Print Club Sticker making vending machine. Spun out of Panasonic’s Central Research Institute in 2001, the company is making a digital photo printing unit thats sure to follow in the foot steps of digital cameras – on phones or otherwise – around the world. By allowing users to input their photos from almost any type of memory card or even straight from the handset IR Port, we think they’ve tapped into a global goldmine. But thats not all we saw, they also gave us a sneak preview at a prototype LED virtual keyboard for mobile devices set to hit the streets here in 2004.
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NTT DoCoMo said on Thursday it expected the number of users of its high-speed 3G mobile phones to grow more than 15-fold to 25 million by 2006, helped by improved handsets and wider coverage. The two-year old service has just past the 1.6 million subscriber mark and now looks primed for huge growth in 2004.
Just got news out from DoCoMo today that Big D has developed its first WLAN FOMA module. Details are sketchy at the moment, with official information we could find limited to a single statement in Japanese. However, the IEEE802.11b compatible clamshell weighs 123g and is 103 mm long by 53 mm wide. DoCoMo has yet to release other specs, or say when the phone is going to be on the market, but a big move for WLAN-FOMA has been on the cards ever since Big D announced it was trailing a FOMA-WLAN network at Japan’s gateway to the world- Narita Airport, with Japan Airlines this June. Meanwhile FOMA added a record 334,000 subscribers in October, underpinning the impression that 3G is finally flying. Could the next batch of FOMA cellies, out in February 04 have WLAN? The news comes on top of a recent report on DoCoMo by CSFB’s Mark Berman appropriately titled 2004: The Year of 3G, predicting FOMA subscriber growth surging to a million a month…
Motorola has unveiled a PDA-phone based on the Windows operating system, giving the company a product range that now spans three major smart phone platforms. Based on Microsoft’s Smartphone 2002 software, joins other recently-launched Motorola phones using the rival Linux and Symbian operating systems. For now the phone will only be available in Hong Kong, according to a Motorola spokesman.
This month marks the 10th anniversary of the Personal Digital Assistant and a decade of Enfour developing software for mobile platforms. That’s right, Enfour was the first company to develop commerical software for PDAs (back then the Newton) but now for all platforms. In fact, Enfour, Inc. was spun-off from Enfour Media Laboratory specifically to pursue development of software for handheld computers.
