toshiba
toshiba

toshiba

DoCoMo Plows $343.8 Million into 3.5G HSDPA

Signaling its seriousness to get its HSDPA (high-speed downlink packet access) network and concomitant mobile/smart phones up and transmitting in 2005, NTT DoCoMo said today that it is plowing 37 billion yen ($343.8 million) into 5 Japanese handset and network builders AND Motorola Japan Inc. What is immediately surprising about this move is that once again, as with yesterday’s media extravaganza on the new 900i phones, long-term handset partners Toshiba, and handset maker and major infrastructure builder Sony Ericsson are both missing. But it now looks like DoCoMo feels its time to start really kicking in the efficiencies to differentiate itself from KDDI’s WIN service both in terms of performance and, more critically, to faster recoup the considerable investment the company has made in 3G as it probably gears up for a packet price war with KDDI and Vodafone KK. And then, there is the leveraging of Motorola’s Linux links too!

DoCoMo Unveils FOMA 900i 3G i-mode Phones

“This is just the beginning,” Takeshi Natsuno, Managing Director of DoCoMo’s i-mode Planning Department, told Wireless Watch of the new flagship 5 FOMA 900i handsets that DoCoMo showed today and that should be released in or around February 2004. Before about 600 journalists, Natsuno’s message was that, after two years of battling battery/bulk problems, here finally, were 3G phones capable of 2G performance in terms of standby time and weight. But beyond this, DoCoMo has clearly worked hard to differentiate the phones from being more than “Super 505i” and hinted that the company was considering lowering data packet rates to compete with KDDI WIN and Vodafone K.K.’s recent Happy Packet rate cuts. But wow! What’s loaded in the the new fab 5, for example 500 Kbytes of gaming capability will be inevitably be the Final Fantasy for gamers (the game appears to be preloaded) and a real nightmare for competitors. Natsuno san, not known for being shy on stage at these sort of events, seemed to speak from the heart when he called the lineup the “best mobile phones in the world!” The critical question for DoCoMo, however, is differentiation from the already all-singing, all-dancing 505 series, and quite a few of our doubts were answered. But questions also remain. We’ll have a video program on the show, the phones and the figures behind the models up soon. Before that, here’s some of the upgraded low down on the fantatabulous 900is. And THEN there are the P900iV and the F900iT.

CEATEC Japan 2003: The Future of Wireless

CEATEC Japan 2003: The Future of WirelessThe Combined Exhibition of Advanced Technologies (CEATEC) is Asia’s premiere trade show for information technology and electronics sectors, including the fields of imaging, information and communications. This event brings together the complete spectrum of new technologies with a total of 505 companies and organizations, including almost every major Japanese electronics and communications company, 170 exhibitors from 16 counties and regions worldwide, exhibited in 2,460 booths. We visited KDDI to take a closer look at their prototype Sanyo Digital TV phone, talked to the Kyocera folks about the upcoming convergence of GSM and CDMA and interviewed DoCoMo about their IT-House service offering coming soon for 3G FOMA handsets. Full Program Run-time 20:39

Wireless Watch at CEATEC; Next Stop Ubiquity

There was some real gold buried in the 2,460 booths and 505 companies that exhibited at the Combined Exhibition of Advanced Technologies (CEATEC) 2003 last week, and a bunch of press releases over the last two weeks have induced us to write a comprehensive tech review of what’s new with mobile technology. At the show we managed to corner the chief designer of Mitsubishi Electric’s next generation keitais (NGKs?) on a new series of very cool modular phones they have developed for next year, Melco looks to have made a conceptual breakthrough with these prototype handsets. Suffice to say we think that series with plug-and-play games console, megapix camera, GPS and other modules that snap onto it’s sleek clamshell design, looks as if they will blow the competition (Sony Ericsson and Samsung versions) out of the water. We also took a ride on the new Sanyo TV-Phone coming out for KDDI and saw a few other goodies like ASIMO and fish feeding with FOMA! We’ll show you all these cool new keitai in action, so be on standby for our video program that’s coming soon. The central message we took from CEATEC was that there are plenty of outstanding innovations coming on stream in the next 18 months that will finally herald the dawn of “ubiquitous” communication. Ahh, ubiquity, the means-anything buzzword that launched a thousand PowerPoint presentations…

KDDI to Launch EZ Navi Walk, a Full-scale Navigation Service

KDDI, Okinawa Cellular and Navitime Corporation are pleased to announce that they will launch ‘EZ Navi Walk’ at the end of October 2003. EZ Navi Walk is a full-scale navigation service for pedestrians that makes use of location information from GPS satellites. EZ Navi Walk has been developed from EZ Navi, and allows users to quickly measure the location of a mobile phone through GPS positioning enabling real time continuous display of their location. The service is equipped with voice guidance and other functions that can navigate users to their destinations.

Toshiba Announces Methanol Fuel Cell for Portable Devices

The world leader in bringing fuel-celltechnology to portable products, today announced a prototype of highly compact,direct methanol fuel cell (DMFC) that opens the way to the use of DMFCas an alternative power source to recharge batteries for personal devicesas small as cell phones, digital still cameras, PDAs and mobile TVs. The new DMFC issmall enough to fit in a carry-on bag or even in a jeans pocket as aportable power source.