Japan's KDDI Goes to the Movies with New Phone
Mon Aug 26, 5:29 AM ET
By Eriko Amaha
TOKYO (Reuters) - KDDI Corp, Japan's second-biggest wireless company, said on Monday it would launch a service in October that would allow users to send and receive videos on their mobile phones, intensifying competition in the hot sector.
The company said the offering was part of its drive to sign up seven million third-generation (3G) mobile subscribers by March -- five million more than it has now.
KDDI hopes the phone, one of four unveiled on Monday, will not only help it retain subscribers but snatch them from rivals such J-Phone, run by Japan Telecom Co and Vodafone Group Plc, which already has a movie e-mail service.
The new video camera-equipped phone, the A5301T, is a made by Toshiba Corp.
KDDI said it was the first mobile handset that could record video clips of up to 15 seconds. J-Phone's offering, the Movie Sha-mail, can record clips of up to five seconds.
KDDI has been offering a phone since December that allows users to download video clips, but not take moving pictures.
KDDI also said it would start offering new discounts to its users from October 1 to encourage them to use data transmission.
"We expect about 70 percent of our users to switch to high-end and feature-rich handsets," KDDI President Tadashi Onodera told a news conference.
The new video phone comes with a slot for a SD (secure digital) memory card to store up to 555 five-second clips.
It can take 310,000-pixel moving pictures that can be attached to e-mails and sent to other mobile phones or personal computers.
Weighing only 119 grammes, the new model is also packed with such features as a global positioning system ( news - web sites) (GPS) and a higher-resolution 260,000-color screen.
KDDI said it would let retailers set the price for the new video phones, but said the price would likely be set at the same level as other high-end handsets, which sell for anywhere between 10,000 and 20,000 yen ($85-$170).
CAMERA PHONES
As Japan's mobile market nears saturation, camera and video phones have emerged as a new growth driver for mobile operators.
J-Phone was the first carrier to roll out still-camera phones in late 2000. The product, with about six million users, has proved a huge hit and the company's Movie Sha-mail service has signed up about 560,000 users since its launch in March.
Overall, at least one out of very five mobile phones in Japan is currently capable of taking, sending and receiving photos, according to an industry group Communications and Information Network Association of Japan.
KDDI said it had reached two million 3G users as of August 23, outdistancing a 3G service offered since last October by NTT DoCoMo ( news - web sites) Inc, Japan's dominant telecoms carrier.
DoCoMo's 3G service offers data transmission of 384 kpbs (kilobits per second), 2.6 times faster than KDDI's 3G service, and allows face-to-face real-time communication.
But so far, only 127,400 people have signed up for the service because of a more limited calling area, shorter battery life and pricier handsets than KDDI's service.
The other three KDDI models unveiled on Monday are all equipped with a built-in camera, and are manufactured by Sanyo Electric Co and Kyocera Corp.
The cameras allow users to snap 110,000-pixel still photos.
KDDI's mobile arm "au," which offers 3G service, has currently 12.8 million subscribers, about 18 percent of Japan's overall mobile market.
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