toshiba
toshiba

toshiba

KDDI Announces More GPS 'Sweets'

KDDI announced new handsets and services this week for their Safety Navi series, original debut in 2005 and improved January 2006, targeted at the the family / youth market. This latest line-up addition includes 3 new models; the Sanyo A5525SA, Toshiba’s A5523T and a so-called Sweets Cute (also by Sanyo), plus several new advanced GPS offerings. One example shows the progress of a users location through the day – using data collected each minute – plotted on a map and viewed by parents or guardians with authorized access on mobile phones or PC’s. The company also announced something that roughly translates into Automatic Photo where remote requests can be made for the handset to take and send a picture!

Japan's Mobile Year in Review

It was the best of times, it was… well, it really was the best of times! Also, as the famous line from Dickens goes, it was the age of wisdom, the age of foolishness and the season of.. Mobile!

Looking back on 2006, it’s hard to decide which news from Japan’s mobile scene was the most spectacular. Vodafone pulled out, Softbank stood up, mobile number portability struck, a record number of new handsets hit the street and – as December winds down – Motorola and Samsung are shipping first foreign-made 3G units into Japan.

A ‘quick’ look at what caught WWJ’s attention in ’06 after the jump.

Toshiba Exits Music by Selling EMI

Toshiba Corp. has announced that it will sell its entire stake in Japanese label Toshiba EMI Ltd. to Britain’s EMI Group Plc, saying that it would sell its stake for about 21 billion yen ($179 million). One of Japan’s major music and entertainment companies, Toshiba EMI is currently controlled 45 percent by Toshiba and the remaining 55 percent by the British music group. Toshiba accepted an offer from the EMI Group as “the music content business today is less relevant to other businesses within the Toshiba Group,” it said in a statement.

NEC Posts Increased First-Half Loss

NEC Corp., losing share to Sharp Corp. and Toshiba Corp. in Japan’s mobile-phone market, said its first- half loss widened fivefold because of a slump in sales. Shares of NEC have slid 35 percent since this year’s peak in April as Toshiba overtook the company in handset sales in the fiscal first-half. NEC today cut its mobile phone shipment target by 33 percent and said the business will post a 48 billion yen operating loss this fiscal year, instead of a previously forecast for a 15 billion yen loss.

World First 8GB SDHC Memory Card

Toshiba announced the global launch of the latest addition to its new series of high-capacity SDHC Memory Cards: the industry’s first 8-gigabyte Class 4 memory card. The new card will be introduced in early January 2007, alongside the 4GB products launched in September, and will give Toshiba a larger commercially available lineup in high performance SD Memory Cards. The SDHC (SD High Capacity) Memory Card is based on the SD Card Association’s SD Specifications Ver2.00, which defines high capacity, high performance enhancements to market-leading SD Memory Cards. The new card meets the Class 4 standard, a speed standard that requires a data write speed of at least 4GB/second. Toshiba is first in the industry to announce the launch of Class 4 8GB SDHC memory card.

KDDI's Aggressive EV-DO Upgrade

The CDMA Development Group (CDG) has reported that KDDI is strengthening its technological and differentiated services lead in Japan by upgrading its CDMA network to so-called Revision A. Rev A’s most compelling benefit will be a dramatic increase in uplink speeds up to 1.8 Mbps and downlink speeds up to 3.1 Mbps, as compared to EV-DO Release 0 that supports speeds up to 153.6 kbps and 2.4Mbps, respectively. KDDI has already announced the availability of two handsets from Toshiba, the W47T and DRAPE, to support the commercial launch of its advanced broadband technology services by December 2006.

Gemini Launches Mobile Community Platform

Gemini Mobile Technologies has announced a new software platform to power mobile communities. The Gemini platform, called eXplo, is the foundation of a new 3D interface from SoftBank Mobile Corporation in Japan, named S! TOWN. SoftBank Mobile’s new S! Town-enabled phones are available today throughout Japan on selected Sharp and Toshiba phone models. Gemini expects to announce new carriers and content providers for eXplo in the coming months.

Wireless HD Coming in 2008

A collection of the biggest powers in consumer electronics, including LG, Matsushita (Panasonic), Samsung, Sony, Toshiba, and SiBEAM announced today that they are teaming together to ratify a standard for wireless high-def signal transmission. United as a technology group going under the name WirelessHD, the companies aim to have a finalized specification in spring 2007. The WirelessHD (WiHD) standard will allow for uncompressed, digital transmission of HD video and audio signals, essentially making it equivalent, in theory, to wireless HDMI.

Japan's Still the World's High-Tech Testbed

This past week, WWJ’s own Lawrence Cosh-Ishii, our hard-working director of digital media (and pretty much everything else in our humble shop), appeared on US Web radio program "Into Tomorrow," hosted by Dave Graveline. Dave and his crew pop over to Tokyo each year for the annual CEATEC consumer tech show, and he makes it his business to hook up with a slate of guests who can provide insidery gen on what’s happening in Japan…

Number Portability – DoCoMo Relying on Napster Japan

DoCoMo relies on Napster by Mobikyo KKDespite the resounding silence from DoCoMo’s website, Tower Records (part-owned by DoCoMo) have just introduced a joint-venture service with Napster in Japan. The Tower Records Japan-Napster JV will provide music distribution services for PC and mobile from an initial catalogue of 1.5 million songs. The initial service launch only allows content purchased by premium subscribers – a subscription costs 1,980 JPY per month – to be moved from the PC to mobile devices – and at this time only one handset (F902is) is supported.

DoCoMo took a 42 percent share of Tower Records here in November 2005 and – if the on-scene hype at DoCoMo’s booth at this week’s CEATEC consumer electronics show is any guide – they appear ready to announce a more aggressive mobile music device line-up in the coming weeks.

The Tower Records initiative appears not unrelated to DoCoMo’s overall mobile music strategy, which has so far run a distant second to mobile market leader KDDI/au.

Since 2002, KDDI have seen strong traffic, sales and handset popularity with their Chaku Uta, Chaku Uta Full, and Chaku Motion full-track audio and video offering. More recently, their new ‘LISMO’ unified PC/mobile content download and syncing service has started to gain customers, while DoCoMo have only this year in June started pushing Chaku Uta Full.