Japan's Docomo Unveils 3G Phones with 3D Sound
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Japan's largest mobile operator, NTT  DoCoMo Inc. 9437.T, unveiled on Wednesday a new line of  advanced mobile phones with stereo-quality surround sound,  high-resolution digital cameras, and a special chip that allows  owners to use their phones as a debit card.
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Vodafone Wednesday formally rolled out its 3G mobile communication products and services in 12 European countries and Japan. The company expects 3G to begin gaining mass market acceptance next year, and forecasts
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NTT DoCoMo, Japan's top mobile-phone carrier, and Motorola Inc., the world's No. 2 cell-phone maker, plan to develop a more sophisticated mobile phone that subscribers in Japan can also use while traveling to other parts of Asia as well as Europe, the companies said Wednesday.
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Top Japanese wireless carrier NTT DoCoMo  9437.T said on Thursday it would launch a 3G phone equipped  for use overseas and including a video conferencing function,  getting a leg-up on its closest rival, KDDI Corp. 9433.T.
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Smartphone users will be able to watch broadband television and snap high-resolution photos on their handsets in 2007, thanks to new processor and memory chips launched at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona on Monday.
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Unveiled at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona, these handsets from Nokia aim to make access to the mobile Internet easy.
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Motorola, No. 2 maker of mobile telephones, and NTT DoCoMo, the world&#39;s second-largest wireless carrier, will jointly develop handsets to attract business customers in Japan.
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With their home market saturated, Japan&#39;s handset makers finally look abroad. Meanwhile, margins have plunged. When NTT Docomo (DCM ) unveiled its latest third-generation mobile phones on Nov. 17, gadget lovers were not disappointed.
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InfoWorld - NTT DoCoMo will partially fund the construction of AT&amp;T&#39;s 3G phone network in Hawaii, it said Thursday.
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Japan&#39;s NTT DoCoMo will join hands with Cingular Wireless of the United States, aiming to unify technical specifications for third-generation (3G) cellphones and services.
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It&#39;s easy to be wowed by Japan&#39;s mobile communications infrastructure. &quot;Next-generation&quot; 3G coverage is now so ubiquitous that carriers have already stopped launching 2G phones; an impressive array of attractive handsets offer free digital TV; phones can be used to pay for goods and train rides, thanks to embedded contactless smart cards; and on the mobile information superhighway data whizzes along at 3.6Mbps. But watch out for the off-ramps.While Japan has led the world with many of the services offered to consumers, in some ways the mobile ecosystem here is downright backward as I found out last weekend when I tried to buy a new phone. A broken handset necessitated a new model and this is where my story begins.In Japan, phones are sold by carriers and not the phone makers. Companies like Fujitsu, NEC, Sony Ericsson, and a few foreign vendors including Nokia, Samsung, and LG sell their phones in the thousands to carriers. This gives carriers the ability to pretty much dictate to the phone maker what software needs to be installed.This model is one of the reasons that mobile Internet services like I-mode took off here so quickly. There was no chicken-and-egg situation with phone makers and users waiting for each other to take the plunge. NTT DoCoMo decided I-mode would be in new phones and so it was.But this model has a downside. Phones are so tightly customized to each carrier that it&#39;s not practical to keep the same handset when switching carriers, and if you see a phone you like you can only buy it if it&#39;s offered by your carrier.Back to my story. The new phone was looking quite expensive so I decided to switch carriers and take advantage of a free phone on a competitor network. Japan launched number portability a year ago, so I could make the jump without losing my cell-phone number. I&#39;d still have the hassle of a new e-mail address, but it appeared a small price to pay.Before long I had a new phone in my hands, but my phone numbers remained locked in the old handset. The new carrier didn&#39;t have a cable to hook up to my old phone so they couldn&#39;t transfer the address book and it wasn&#39;t possible to beam it between the phones. While my old carrier was gung-ho on Bluetooth, my new carrier wasn&#39;t so enthusiastic, so the new phone had no support. Similarly, while the new phone offered infrared, the old phone didn&#39;t. Heavy customization strikes again.Back home I fired up my PC and managed to get my address book from the old phone into the computer. Getting it to the new phone via a memory card seemed like an easy task ... but no! The VCard file wasn&#39;t being properly read by the new phone. Carriers, it was explained to me when I called the help line, often used custom fields in their VCards so there were sometimes problems. So much for a common standard.I won&#39;t bore you with the technicalities of how I eventually got my address book into my new phone, but suffice to say this story has a happy ending. I&#39;m now back in cruise control, enjoying all the attractions the mobile superhighway has to offer.The number portability system that enabled me to keep my phone number is coincidentally one-year-old this week. About 3 percent of users in Japan -- roughly 3.7 million people -- have made use of the system during its first year -- far less than the industry predicted, or feared.One thing that&#39;s said to be stopping users from switching is the inability to keep their e-mail addresses. While carriers fussed over the details of keeping numbers, they forgot, or perhaps ignored, the need to carry e-mail addresses between carriers. In other countries this wouldn&#39;t be a big deal because most messaging is done via SMS, which relies on phone numbers, but in Japan the advanced stage of the market has again caused hassle for consumers.
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Cell phone maker touts new E series handsets, optimized for Internet access on the go--at 3GSM World Congress in Spain.
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TOKYO: Motorola and NTT DoCoMo, Japan&#39;s top mobile phone operator, said yesterday they would jointly develop third-generation (3G) handsets, giving Motorola a way into a market largely out of reach for foreign manufacturers.
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Vodafone has heralded a &quot;new era in mobile communications&quot; as it unveiled its long-delayed 3G services, which will allow video calls, downloads of film clips and a new generation of games.
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Nokia , the world's largest  mobile phone maker, unveiled three new mobile handsets on  Monday intended to boost its offering of mid-range phones and  lift its global market share further from 36 percent.
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Mobile phone giant Vodafone says it will introduce 10 new 3G handsets, many of which will be useable in both Europe and Japan.
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An anonymous reader writes &quot;NEC and Panasonic have developed three Linux-powered 3G mobile phones to be introduced in Japan in the coming months -- NEC&#39;s N900iL, NEC&#39;s N901iC, and Panasonic&#39;s P901i.