Samsung, the No. 3 manufacturer of cell phones, has agreed to make i-mode mobile Internet phones, which have been hugely popular in Japan.
I-mode, created by Japan's No. 1 cell-phone carrier -- the state-run NTT DoCoMo -- lets its 37 million subscribers check e-mail, play games and browse i-mode websites on their mobile phones. DoCoMo has tried to bring the service to other parts of the world by buying minor stakes in cell-phone carriers such as AT&T Wireless in the United States and KPN in the Netherlands, but has, as a result, found itself writing off huge amounts of debt in its overseas investments.
Now DoCoMo has teamed up with Samsung, an electronics maker based in South Korea that is a major competitor of the Japanese electronics companies. DoCoMo may be riding on Samsung's reputation: It currently controls 9.8 percent of the global cell-phone market and is the third-largest manufacturer after No. 1 Nokia and No. 2 Motorola, according to market research firm Gartner Dataquest.
Samsung's i-mode phones are expected to hit stores worldwide in early 2004, DoCoMo officials said.
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Ericsson floats an idea: Ericsson appears to have a waterproof, floating mobile phone in the works.
The mobile-phone maker (ERICY) was recently granted a patent for an attachable buoyancy device for cell phones.
The unit, which was proposed to the World Intellectual Property Organization on Jan. 16, covers the battery of the phone and protects it from water. If the phone were to fall off of a boat and into the ocean, for example, the device would help the phone stay afloat, according to the patent.
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Europe's mobile wallet: Four of Europe's biggest mobile-phone operators are working together to let their customers make purchases using their handsets, both online and in physical stores.
Orange, T-Mobile, Vodafone and Spain's Telefonica Móviles formed an alliance to establish an industry standard that will permit merchants to accept the mobile phone as a form of payment.
Up to now, making purchases over a cell phone either by using the phone, which is linked to a credit card account, to scan an item or manually punching the bar code of an item into the phone has been a total flop. As Orange, T-Mobile, Vodafone and Telefonica recently acknowledged, the option isn't readily available to people, and cell-phone users find it cumbersome to make purchases over the number keypad and tiny screen of a cell phone.
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Wireless Internet explodes: The number of people getting access to the Internet over their laptops or cell phones is expected to spike by almost 300 percent by 2007, according to Probe Research.
The Asia-Pacific region will contribute more than half of those subscribers. China alone will add a quarter of those new subscribers, said Probe analyst David Chamberlain, who wrote the report.
Chamberlain said most of the subscriber growth through this year would be on CDMA networks. After that, however, he said other wireless network technologies, particularly 3G systems, will start to gain traction.
Reuters contributed to this report.
