Willcom
Willcom

Willcom

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.

Japan Number Portability: The Autumn of Discontent

The hottest topic roiling Tokyo’s hot street this month is MNP – mobile number portability.

Details on pricing, dates and procedures that Japan’s carriers will follow to implement the regulator-mandated programme have been posted on WWJ in several items on this topic, including here, here and here.. Analysts, pundits and assorted commentators have all more or less concluded that the net winner will be KDDI/au, while the net loser will be DoCoMo (the jury is still out on Vodafone/SoftBank Mobile). At least some are attributing this pending negative migration to mere probability – as the carrier with the largest customer base, they argue, DoCoMo naturally stand to lose the biggest number of churners – all things being equal. But this analysis is weak and WWJ thinks..

Drink Beer & Win a 1-Seg Digital TV Watch

Asahi Breweries has teamed up with Willcom to give away 5,000 1-Seg digital TV watches. According to the Willcom contest info page: “By inserting W-SIM in a slot, you can make a telephone call and use mail over the microcell network of Willcom.” No info on the hardware specifications, such as battery run time, etc., that we could find in a hurry; however, we’re looking forward to seeing these units popping up around town and are actually just rushing out the door now to buy a flat of brews so we hopefully get one of our own!

Kyocera to Share Research Costs

Kyocera Corp., which makes handsets for Carlyle Group Inc.’s Willcom Inc. and KDDI Corp., plans to boost profit by sharing research costs at its mobile phone and network businesses in Japan, U.S. and China, its president said. The company is creating a new unit to combine the businesses and shifting some development operations to India, President Makoto Kawamura said in an interview in Kyoto yesterday. The new unit will comprise of the company’s handset-making business in Japan, San Diego, California-based Kyocera Wireless Corp. and a cell phone business in China, Kawamura said.

Guppy Games Signs with Kotobuki

Guppy Games has selected Kotobuki Solution Co., Ltd. (KEMCO Japan) as their distribution partner for releasing mobile game contents in Japan. The first title for distribution will be Jump Girls with an expected launch by fall 2006. Jump Girls is a strategy puzzle game jointly developed by ZIO Interactive which has been very popular on South Korean carriers. KEMCO Japan will be the distribution partner for launching Jump Girls with the four major Japanese carriers: NTT DoCoMo, KDDI, Vodafone, and Willcom.

DoCoMo's Blackberry: Q&A with Research in Motion Japan

DoCoMo's Blackberry: Q&A with Research in Motion JapanThe pending Japan arrival of Research in Motion (RIM)’s hyperpopular BlackBerry email device, widely known as the ‘CrackBerry’ for its simple, efficient and addictive delivery of corporate email, will inject a new dimension into this country’s complex device and service matrix.
A wise move or a sign of desperation? These two viewpoints seem to characterize media, pundits’ and bloggers’ responses to last month’s announcement that DoCoMo would bring the BlackBerry email device into Japan, in partnership with RIM, based in Canada. Our own take on it was: Who Cares? WWJ was mindful that “virtually everyone in Japan’s workforce already has an always-on, fully connected email device right in their back pocket — in other words, a phone!”

Furthermore, before and since then, there has been more news, helping make it even more difficult to assess the BlackBerry’s prospects.

According to the pundits, NTT DoCoMo’s decision to import the BlackBerry is either (a) a master stroke aimed at securing the giant carrier’s corporate mobile offerings as 3G competition heats up in 2006/07, or (b) expensive folly that will see enterprise sales teams saddled with a clunky, ‘not-made-here’ device that competes poorly if at all against universal 3G phones that already receive push mail in real time, thank you very much (and some media reports have stated the first Japan BlackBerrys won’t even accept Japanese text input). The truth, however, is probably somewhere between these extremes, and so WWJ went straight to the source.

Motorola and RIM Rolling in – SoftBank a No-Show?

Last week saw an interesting double play for mobile devices in Japan as both NTT DoCoMo and Willcom announced new phones — DoCoMo’s 7-Series — or new PDAs — Sharp’s oddly named W-Zero3[es]. These, combined with the continuing speculation on the this fall’s entry of RIM’s Blackberry email device (will it have Japanese text input capability?), made it a busy week for wireless watchers.

On Tuesday, WWJ was first on the Web with a full report and images of DoCoMo’s new 7-Series, a mix of models from Sharp, Panasonic, NEC and Mitsubishi, as well as from US maker Motorola…

Another Smartphone Soon Via Willcom

Willcom, Microsoft and Sharp have introduced their next generation smartphone. The Zero3 [es] is powered by Intel’s PXA270 CPU at 416MHz, with 128MB of flash memory and 64MB of SDRAM. In addition to the Windows Mobile 5.0 (Japanese) operating system, the phone also comes with the Opera mobile browser and Flash pre-installed. It has a 1.3-megapixel camera, miniSD removable memory, a USB 2.0 port and QR code reader. According to the press release, they are working on seperate W-Fi, Bluetooth and 1Seg TV tuner cards to be released at a later date.

DoCoMo Brings Blackberry to Japan. Who Cares?

DoCoMo Brings Blackberry to Japan. Who Cares?Last Thursday, NTT DoCoMo announced they would deploy the super-popular BlackBerry email device, made by Canadian firm Research in Motion (RIM), in Japan, in autumn 2006. At first glance, the news is pretty interesting.

One media report stated that “RIM stands to make potentially more money per customer with the DoCoMo deal by marketing its BlackBerrys in addition to its service.” Until recently, Japan lacked a decent, usable email device targeting corporate users.

Willcom has been offering Sharp’s super-cool Zero3, a Windows mobile OS device that has been flying off the shelves since the end of 2005, but it’s a consumer/prosumer device that is sold direct to the street and its POP/SMTP email capability doesn’t integrate (easily) into a corporate server.

[The full text of this article is available, for free, as an exclusive column contributed to the Wireless-Watch Community. — Eds]

Willcom Announces New Zero3 Smartphone

Willcom has announced an updated model of their hyper-popular smartphone, the W-ZERO3 series by Sharp. The WS004SH will hit the streets here on June 22nd and will be running pretty much the same spec. as the original version, with a couple of small exceptions. They have doubled the onboard flash memory from 128mb and added a 300,000 item dictionary, including a Japanese-English “DicLand Ver1.1” suite. Otherwise, it’s the same Windows Mobile 5.0 OS on an Intel PXA270 416MHz CPU with no improvement on the 1.3 mega-pixel camera or battery pack which have be the only serious complaint issues from owners who were so eager to buy the debut model last year.