2004 trend-watchers take note.AS RECENTLY REPORTED AND published by the Telecommunications Carriers Association: The Japanese market added 500,000 new subscribers in December of last year, reaching a grand total of about 80 million mobile subscribers. The carriers that successfully introduced new services and devices posted the greatest gains. KDDI topped the ranks for the third month in a row. In December, KDDI gobbled up 57 percent of the overall new subscribers, with 600,000 signing on as cdma-1X subscribers. Half of the KDDI customer base has now switched to cdma-1X phones, which offer super-fast multimedia downloads and GPS functionality. During the New Year's holidays, we observed legions of Tokyo day-trippers toting KDDI's latest Hitachi 3G handsets. Vodafone was finally able to improve upon its relatively weak autumn 2003 performance. Due to its aggressive packet-fee discounts and sexy devices, Vodafone has the potential to grow by more than 100,000 subscribers. The company recently launched the Sharp V-601SH phone equipped with a 2 Megapixel One million pixels. Refers to the resolution of a digital imaging device (monitor, scanner, video camera, still camera, etc.). For example, a five-megapixel digital still camera might take a picture composed of 5,038,848 red-green-blue color dots (pixels). camera. The camera is impressive, boasting autofocus autofocus Noun a camera system in which the lens is focused automatically Noun 1. autofocus - an optical device for focussing a camera or other instrument automatically and 20x zoom. Vodafone also got its first TV-handset in the market--but we have yet to see many people showing it off. Although DoCoMo's i-mode subscriber base fell slightly during a single week in December, it may still post growth for the full month. And i-mode seems set to have a stellar year in 2004. FOMA See i-Mode. is finally gaining momentum at the cost of its 2G subscriber base. There are almost 1.9 million FOMA subscribers now. The new FOMA subscribers from late 2003 must have felt a little disappointed when DoCoMo announced the new FOMA 900i-series. Sharp, Panasonic, Mitsubishi, Fujitsu and NEC (NEC Corporation, Tokyo, www.nec.com, www.necus.com) An electronics conglomerate known in the U.S. for its monitors. In Japan, it had the lion's share of the PC market until the late 1990s (see PC 98). NEC was founded in Tokyo in 1899 as Nippon Electric Company, Ltd. launched 900i devices in February. Surprisingly, Sony, Ericsson and Toshiba were not among the handset The part of the telephone that contains the speaker and the microphone. On a desktop phone, the part you hold in your hand is the handset. On a cellphone, the entire phone is the handset. See multihandset cordless and headset. manufacturers mentioned by DoCoMo. The new phones can handle 500kB Java applications A Java program that is run stand alone. The Java Virtual Machine in the client or server is interpreting the instructions. Contrast with Java applet. See servlet. (a preview we saw of a J-League soccer game was very impressive). Production costs of this richer content are decreasing rapidly. To satisfy content providers, DoCoMo had to raise the maximum subscription fee from [yen]300 to [yen]500. The i-menu on the phones can be browsed using Flash. Furthermore, DoCoMo will finally introduce chaku-uta (MP3 downloads) on its mainstream phones, and the text-based mail function will be extended with HTML HTML in full HyperText Markup Language Markup language derived from SGML that is used to prepare hypertext documents. Relatively easy for nonprogrammers to master, HTML is the language used for documents on the World Wide Web. , enabling mail-magazines to add richer contents. |
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