When Rei Nagashima, a 20-year-old university student, first saw the new-fangled mobile phone, she thought it was pretty cool, not to mention harmless. Equipped with a tiny camera, the sleek device could take and send not only photos, but video clips as well. It was given to Nagashima (not her real name) by her wealthy boyfriend after she taunted him, half jokingly, to buy her a new mobile phone.
It’s rare for me to be Oh-My-God! impressed by mobile applications these days (blame it on George Bush and the endless beat of dreary war drums…), but the demo we saw was really terrific. The animations were great, the sound effects weren’t irritating (like they are with a lot of Java applets), and you could access pics of all the latest car models that slide onto the screen from the left or the right. If there’s a better way to sell cars via mobile, this may be it.
If at first you don’t succeed, then try again – or so says NTT DoCoMo. I-mode, NTT’s mobile multimedia messaging service, was launched in Germany, Holland and Belgium almost a year ago by network operator KPN NV (KPN), but consumers weren’t keen. Now, the Japanese mobile network operator is launching i-mode in France and Spain, and is hoping this second European push succeeds.
The past couple of weeks saw two lavish events at trendy Tokyo venues hosted by carriers NTT DoCoMo and J-Phone to fete their content provider communities (so, yes, there was a lot of overlap in the guest lists). One attendee at the J-Phone event, held at Zepp in Odaiba, reported that it was a sweaty, raucous evening with content community punters packed in six deep. “There was a lengthy line-up of folks waiting to exchange meishi business cards,” she said, adding that a good time was had, evidently, by all.
Japan’s largest newspaper Web sites get hundreds of millions of page views per month. But many new media pioneers are still unsure where news sites fit into the media mix in Japan — and whether they’ll ever make a profit. A man walks by a bank in Osaka just as it erupts into flames. He pulls out a camera-equipped cell phone — one of 10 million in use in Japan — and snaps a photo.
But trouble is looming for the battery world. While lithium-ion batteries represent today’s cutting edge, the gadgetry that depends on them is advancing more quickly than the power technology. As mobile devices take on richer features, battery life has become a key issue for gadget developers, and now manufacturers need to go one better than lithium-ion, in both size and energy output.
