NTT DoCoMo (NYSE: DCM) is joining the mobile money market with its own remittance service. Starting from July 21st, individual users (as opposed to corporate customers) of the carrier’s i-mode service will be able to remit up to 20,000 yen (about $208) per transfer by simply inputting the payee’s mobile phone number. The payee then receives a mail notification on its mobile phone and is given the option of depositing the money in a domestic bank account or having the amount credited to their monthly phone bill. The payee can receive remittances totaling up to 200,000 yen (about $2,080) per month.
Best of all, the service doesn’t require any registration or opening of a specific bank account!
Cost wise, the charges per payment (including consumption tax) will be 105 yen for the payer and 65 yen for the payee. The payee is not charged, however, if the remittance is deposited into a Mizuho Bank account or credited to their monthly phone bill.
NTT DoCoMo (NYSE: DCM) announced that its European subsidiary, DoCoMo Netherlands, has launched Europe’s first mobile service for downloading Japanese Manga comics.
The service called MANGA MODE will initially launch in France, and is expected to appeal to the growing number of Manga lovers in the country.
Customers of Bouygues Telecom will be able to use the service to download French translations of famous manga comics into their mobile phones and view them panel by panel using a dedicated reader app. Bouygues Telecom has posted a dedicate page on its mobile web portal from where customers can sign-up for the service…
What happens when you combine Tata Teleservices with NTT DoCoMo (NYSE: DCM)? Well, it’s obvious, at least now – Tata DoCoMo. And that’s exactly the new name of the GSM operator owned by Tata Group and partly (26%) by the Japanese leading mobile operator.
The new brand along with the new website was developed by the Business and Technology Cooperation Committee that DOCOMO and TTSL have jointly established, and it symbolizes “the two companies’ strong partnership.”
Tata is already one of the leading operators in India’s ever-growing mobile market, and plans to further expand to southern parts of the country this month and gradually nationwide.
The ravishing TG01 from Toshiba (OTCPK: TOSBF) will be landing in Spain by way of Telefonica (NYSE: TEF) and Japan through NTT DoCoMo (NYSE: DCM) between June and July. It wasn’t long ago that O2 (NYSE: TEF) made the same announcement for Germany, but what about North America? No love just yet? We’ve had a brief glimpse of the sequel handsets, which will also be running on Qualcomm (NSDQ: QCOM)’s impressive 1Ghz Snapdragon chip – maybe we’ll see them locally here in Canada and the U.S. while the TG01 makes its rounds on the other side of the pond. The specs for the TG01, if you haven’t seen them, are quite impressive:
Four Japanese mobile operators will spend 1 trillion yen ($10 billion) during the next five years to build a next-gen mobile network with faster Internet speeds.
According to Nikkei – NTT DoCoMo (NYSE: DCM), KDDI, Softbank (OTCPK: SFTBF) and Emobile will apply to the government for licenses for the new standard (LTE?) by May 7. DoCoMo plans to launch the new network during next year, while three other players will do the same between 2011 and 2012.
As for the rest of the world, we can only hope carriers elsewhere will follow the Japanese example and at least start planning their networks during the next year.
In the hip world of design, ergonomics is king. We see ergonomic design in computer mice made to fit your hand or chairs made to conform to your supple rump, but a new audio technology from NTT DoCoMo (NYSE: DCM) promises to bring ergonomic audio to the mobile space. NTT DoCoMo’s new “spatial audio transmission technology” allows the mobile user to arrange multiple callers in a virtual audio field – so you hear your conference-calling co-worker as if he were sitting next to you, with your boss’s voice seemingly coming to you from across the table.
Ergonomic hearing technology just makes sense. We routinely distinguish between multiple voices in a crowded room just by listening to their apparent position, but phone calls have been slow to key in on this natural human ability. NTT DoCoMo’s breakthrough takes fits the way we hear multiple sound sources, just as that expensive mesh-chair fits the way your body sits.
The spatial audio tech requires that the user wear headphones in order to “hear each speaker’s voice as if it were coming from a unique direction, creating a virtual face-to-face communication environment.” The technology reduces processing overhead by combining the encoding/decoding and spatial processing of the audio sources. Future mobile phones and network servers will work hand-in-hand to deliver audio encoded with NTT DoCoMo’s spatial audio information.
Conference calls have the most to benefit from NTT DoCoMo’s breakthrough, but applications in tele-education and online gaming are intriguing possibilities for this audio technology. The tech will debut during the Wireless Technology Park 2009 at Pacifico Yokohama on May 12 and 13.
NTT DoCoMo (NYSE: DCM) will be offering Japan’s first Android device this year. It will be HTC Magic, prepacked and optimized for the Japanese market. That said, DoCoMo will offer the all-touchscreen device as the HT-03A.
As expected, it will run Android 1.5 (aka Cupcake) and will most likely have additional software built-in to suit DoCoMo customers’ needs.
Release date is unknown and the same goes for pricing. As soon as we hear something new, we’ll let you know, k?
A low-end texter I could understand having some temperature problems, but the illustrious BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) Bold? Why, I never…! Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo (NYSE: DCM) has pulled the BlackBerry Bold off shelves due to overheating issues, after having put the smartphone on them only last week. It’s not a battery issue apparently, so we can rule out explosive fatalities on that front; rather, it’s the keyboard that’s heating up, according to 30 of the 4,000 purchasers last week. If you got your Bold anywhere else, you shouldn’t have to worry, though.
“This issue appears to be specifically limited to the BlackBerry Bold devices sold in Japan since last week and sales of BlackBerry Bold devices in other countries are unaffected by this matter,” RIM said in a statement.
Whether this has to do with the camera-less variant or the extra 3G band crammed in there is as yet undetermined. The official announcement for the 9000 came back in September, with official timelines locked in in November. Hopefully it won’t take long for this heat problem to get sorted – it would be just plain cruel to deprive the Japanese of such a fine handset.
According to pcworld.com, NTT DoCoMo (NYSE: DCM) has said it will switch off it’s 2G network in 2012.
DoCoMo was the first to launch 3G services in 2001, and released the last 2G phone in 2004 – so you can can almost visualise the curves in the finance graph that helped them decide! Another very persuasive stat must have been that by Dec ‘08, 88% of the 54mn subs were on the 3G network.
Interestingly, their 3G network is WCDMA-based (almost, but not quite, the world standard for 3G) – but their 2G network was a homebrew PDC ’standard’, that NTT developed – however this never gained any traction other than in the domestic market.
Imagining that finance graph that shows 2G dropping away, and 3G maturing, you’ve got to wonder if there is a third line on there – for their 4G and/or 5G services of course!
NEC is presenting four handsets at the upcoming Mobile World Congress in two weeks, all based on the 22-phone lineup scheduled to be wrapped up by March. The Prime N-01A is a multi-configurable touchscreen device with 3.2 inch VGA screen, 5.2 megapixel camera with advanced face detection and auto focus and SRS TruMedia for virtual surround-sound.
The Style N-02A closely resembles the N-03A, the prime difference is that the N-03A was designed by (apparently) famous French Pastry Chef Pierre Herme. Wow, really? A phone designed by a pastry chef? The N-03A will come appropriately preloaded with a bunch of “gourmet content”. The N-02A is a little more business, featuring mobile TV, 5.2 megapixel camera, face detection and 15 different key illuminations for various kinds of alerts. Finally, the Smart N-04A is a global roaming phone with 3G and mobile TV in a slider form factor.
According to 
