The Empire strikes back

DoCoMo's FOMA 3G service has until now had feet of clay, mostly because the handsets have lacked the zing that allowed i-mode to win the hearts and minds of millions. Two of its latest FOMA handsets, however, offer encouraging signs that that may be about to change. More than that, they manage to fit in more cool things per square inch than is officially allowed by zoning laws. Surprise leader of the pack is not NEC or Matsushita, but Fujitsu, the geeky younger brother that thus far has been messing around with fingerprint scanners and stuff and never quite getting it together while its bigger siblings play to the lowest common denominator and sell millions.

The Fujitsu F900iT has a 2.4-inch touchpanel display that you can draw on with a stylus (and e-mail the results as graphics file attachments), which can be swivelled around 180 degrees and folded flat to turn it into a sort of PDA-digicam hybrid. It has Bluetooth (finally!). It's a videophone. It has a USB cradle for syncing with a PC. It has a battery that lasts for 450 of your Earth hours. And it comes in one colour: black.

Running the F900iT a close second is Matsushita's P900iV. It loses points to the Fujitsu phone by having the temerity to come in silly shades of orange and white as well as "Crowd Black" (doubtless that should be "cloud", though that doesn't make us like it any more), but scores for having the same twisty display as the Fujitsu handset, plus the ability to shoot QVGA-size MPEG 4 video via the 1.95-megapixel camera in the hinge, with the screen turned side-on, camcorder stylee. There's also a cable for hooking up to TVs and projectors. Standby time pips the Fujitsu marginally, at 500 hours.

Regarding the NEC N900iS we can find very little to say except "sorry, better luck next time." Changes from the straight N900i are that, well, the UI is a bit better and you get some HTML mail templates and stuff. Woo.

DoCoMo product pages: F900iT, N900iS, P900iV.

[Read: NTT DoCoMo: Press Release (includes a link to a PDF with some stats for each phone)]

[Update: These could be out within June, apparently. Japan-only, needless to say]

Posted by aragoto at June 02, 2004 12:39 PM | TrackBack