kddi

DoCoMo users hit 60 million, half Japan's population

TOKYO--Though its growth has slowed significantly in recent years, DoCoMo managed to get more than 60 million Japanese to sign up for contracts as of last Sunday.

That's nearly half Japan's population of 127 million. The figure includes subscribers to DoCoMo's LTE, 3G, and 2G mobile services.

DoCoMo's high growth period in the late 1990s saw it increasing by 10 million users in only 18 months. But recent years have proven more challenging for the phone giant. … Read more

KDDI bows superthin Fujitsu Arrows ES IS12F

Japanase wireless provider KDDI announced an ultrathin Android smartphone this week with the waterproof Fujitsu Arrows ES IS12F.

Weighing in at only 105 grams (3.7 ounces), the handset is only 6.7mm (0.26 inches) at its thinnest spot and just 8.5mm thick (0.33 inch) at its fattest point. For the sake of comparison, the Droid Razr is 7.1mm in its thinnest spot.

Additional specifications for the smartphone include a 1.4GHz Snapdragon processor, a 4-inch AMOLED display, a 5-megapixel camera, and a 1,400mAh battery. You'll also find both CDMA and GSM radios, Wi-Fi (… Read more

KDDI haptic touch screen pushes your buttons

MAKUHARI, Japan--If you're always pressing the wrong icon on your smartphone touch screen, Japan's KDDI is working on a haptic screen that makes it feel like you're pushing a button instead of just a flat surface.

Prototypes shown off here at Ceatec 2011 respond to pressure and provide a sensation of clicking a keyboard button. The cellphone giant demoed potential applications including easier Web browsing and more interactive game playing.

The tech was developed for industrial applications by Kyocera, which was exhibiting a small tactile screen for industrial use at the trade show outside Tokyo. It consists of a touch panel sitting on an LCD with piezoelectric elements.

KDDI has shown off the tech before for text input at Wireless Japan, but Ceatec saw its first demo for Web browsing and video games. … Read more

X-ray phone flashes its guts for all to see

Transparent keypads and displays on handsets are so passe now that the X-ray phone is here to show off its guts in their full glory. If you're into electronic circuitry, microchips, and all the tiny modules that work harmoniously together to let you make a call and send a text message, then the X-ray phone might be for you.

Created by Japanese designer Tokujin Yoshioka, the X-ray comes with a 7x102 dot-matrix LED sub-panel that displays the current time and incoming e-mail alerts, as well as an 8-megapixel autofocus camera with an onboard photo light.

Three colors--deep red, black, … Read more

Motion-aware phones may be your new nemesis

Trust the Japanese to come up with this. By analyzing how smartphones with built-in accelerometers relate to everyday actions, i.e. walking or running, KDDI Laboratories has apparently found a way to help supervisors do their jobs better.

The motion patterns from the cellular are sent to a back-end analytical server, which then matches and determines the type of actions associated with the phone. Of course, the accuracy of such an implementation will get better over time as more data is collected, but it's really all moot if you don't carry the handset with you when you're … Read more

KDDI chooses 3Tera for cloud infrastructure

KDDI, Japan's No. 2 telecom provider, recently launched "KDDI Cloud Server Service" to offer managed cloud services to customers in Japan.

The new service is notable for at least two reasons: 1. As recently as two years ago, Japanese businesses were not enamored by the cloud. 2. The technology to run the service is provided by cloud computing company 3Tera and was not developed in house.

It's a nice win for 3Tera's approach to cloud services, one that provides a browser-based Visio-like UI that lets you create application sets by dragging in resources that create … Read more

Polaris cell phone bot predicts your behavior

Japanese design firm Flower Robotics has unveiled a new concept robot cell phone that moves around on two wheels and learns from user behavior.

Flower teamed up with telecom KDDI and its Iida line of products to create the device, dubbed Polaris. In the Japanese video below it looks like a cousin of the Sony Rolly MP3 player, but Polaris is more than just a pair of wheels and electronics.

Polaris consists of a robot sphere and the phone itself. The sphere can autonomously dock with its charging unit. The phone gathers information about user behavior and sends it to … Read more

Wi-Fi finds back door into ordinary cell phones

Japanese mobile carrier KDDI is showcasing a neat way for providing ordinary cell phones with Wi-Fi.

The trick is to integrate Wi-Fi technology on MicroSD cards, used for storage in most modern mobile phones.

At Wireless Japan 2009, now under way in Tokyo, KDDI is exhibiting two different cards manufactured by Mitsumi Electric and Renesas Technology, Japanese Web site Techon reports.

Both have a wireless LAN IC compliant with IEEE802.11b/g, a transceiving antenna, and passive components. There's no information on release date, compatibility, or battery consumption, which could be an issue, but if the product comes to … Read more

Sharp's sun-powered phone almost beach-ready

Sunbathers in Japan will have another beach- or pool-friendly keitai (phone) to carry around this summer. Simply known as the Solar Phone SH002, a 10-minute exposure to direct sunlight will yield one minute of talktime or two hours of standby.

Of course, the mileage you get is dependent on factors like the intensity of solar radiation and cloud cover. But you should be able to juice up the battery to 80 percent of its capacity if left outdoors long enough. There's even a Flash animation app that tells you how fast your phone is charging with a growing number … Read more