DoCoMo at CEATEC

While it doesn't have any juicy product releases to compete with KDDI, DoCoMo is as usual damned if it is going to let others elbow it out of the limelight. At CEATEC the company has been showing a variety of possible FOMA applications.

Most involve DoCoMo's AV Adaptor, a relay unit into which slots a PC-card type FOMA terminal. This can be used to stream images from a video entryphone to a FOMA handset, or, going the other way, allow remote control of household appliances from one's cellphone (controlling a vacuum-cleaner robot with a camera mounted on it, in the example on display). Another technology on display involved using a Java application to photograph a digital watermark embedded in an advertising poster, extract the ID in the watermark, and automatically point the phone's browser to the website it referenced.

Much of this sounds like stopgap fluff to keep the punters interested, and it probably is. More worthwhile viewing seems to have been provided by DoCoMo president Keiji Tachikawa's address. He seems to have covered a lot of ground, but to sum up--

(1) FOMA downlink speeds will rise to 2Mbps average, 14Mbps peak in 2005.

(2) DoCoMo's cellphone worldview is "80% data, 20% voice". DoCoMo has already reached this stage and thinks the world will ultimately follow suit. It also believes that machine to machine communications are a big part of the future (this is something the company has been talking about for a while).

(3) FOMA functions are set to broaden dramatically. One of the presentation slides lists noncontact ICs, RFID, 2D barcode, credit card and infra-red data transfer as future functions to enable mobile e-commerce. All have been mentioned before, but from the slide it looks like the plan is to include all of them as standard in all phones. (?) GPS navigation, remote monitoring, and terrestrial digital TV tuners also look likely to be included.

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Posted by aragoto at October 08, 2003 05:43 PM | TrackBack