New Carrier (EMOBILE), New Device (Sharp EM-ONE)

EMOBILE (Japanese) have announced they will launch their 3.6 Mbps HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access) from March 31 in Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka and Kyoto with other areas to follow later in the year. The sexy Sharp EM-ONE (Japanese)Windows Mobile device from Sharp will also be released to work with the service at the same time. (A PC Card will also be available with Express Cards and CF cards on the way).

The EM-ONE's key features are:

• a 4.1" Wide VGA (800×480) screen
• dual slide including keyboard, cursor button, pointing device and scroll wheel
• 1-seg tuner for mobile digital TV
• Windows Mobile 5.o
• Marvell® PXA270 520MHｚ CPU
  
• NVIDIA GoForce™ 5500 graphics accelerator
• Stereo speakers and microphone
• 1 x Mini-SD card slot
• 512MB of flash memory and 128MB SDRAM
• 1.3 megapixel camera
• Wi-Fi and Bluetooth
  
• 140mm×70mm×18.9mm and 250g
• Additional bundled software including J-E dictionary, Opera Mobile and barcode reader
• 4 hour battery life!
  

A great looking device, the site is really pushing the mobile internet and entertainment features. The 4 hour battery life is a bit worrying though!

The device will cost from 95,000 yen (US$860) to 39,000 yen (US$350) if you take out a 2 year contract. The flat rate plans will be 5,980 yen (US$55) a month or 4,980 (US$45) a month with a 1 year contract. The pricing looks competitive compared to both Willcom's PHS and DoCoMo and Softbank's flat rate plans, but note this won't be a phone.

It's great to see exciting options like this appearing for people who want to access the internet on the move. Let's see how Softbank, DoCoMo, Willcom and AU respond!

Update

Some photos (taken with my phone) of the EM-ONE for sale at BIC Camera in advance of the official launch:

New Windows Mobile Devices for Japan - HTC Athena and Toshiba

Along with the announcement of Windows Mobile 6 at 3GSM in Barcelona, we are starting to hear news of new devices soon to hit the shelves.

Not officially announced yet, but the HTC Athena device looks very interesting. There are some YouTube videos on the HTC Fan site (Japanese).

It was also reported in the Nikkei this morning that Softbank is looking to release phones from Toshiba like those announced at 3GSM:

• Pocket PC Thoughts Article
• IT Pro Article
• Google search for 'Toshiba G900'

More news as we get it.

Windows Mobile 6 to be Announced Monday

It's been officially announced that Windows Mobile 6 will be announced on Monday. (Yes - an announcement about an announcement ;-) so we will start seeing official reviews of the betas all over the the web from today.

Joel over at geek.com has a well written, concise overview of some of the new features. Well worth a read and I look forward to seeing the follow up article.

As soon as we get any news on new hardware in Japan with Windows Mobile 6 we'll be posting here so stay tuned.

Spb Welcomes Japanese Users

It's great to see overseas developers developing for the Japanese market. Spb have a great range of products including Spb Backup,Spb Diary, Spb Finance, Spb GPRS Monitor, Spb Insight, Spb Mobile DVD, Spb Pocket Plus, Spb Time and Spb Weather. A message from their newsletter:

Spb Software House extends the Asian languages support. Japanese customers are very important for our company and this is why Japanese is one more language officially supported by Spb Software House. We are happy to inform our Japanese customers that from now on they can use their favorite products in their mother tongue!

Spb Website in Japanese
Spb Website in English