Various 3G phones displayed here included such technologies as organic EL displays, dedicated MPEG-4 encoder/decoder chips, CMOS and CCD image sensors, 3-D graphics engines, GPS chips and Java virtual machines.

While U.S. carriers view such multimedia features as non-essential for business users, Japan's three largest wireless carriers insist that their services require constant refreshment.

Japan Telecom, the country's third-largest mobile carrier, said it has sold 1.8 million mobile phones embedded with a tiny CMOS camera since last November. Armed with seven different handsets from four suppliers, the company has become Japan's first wireless operator to tap consumers demand to e-mail still images via mobile phones using the current-generation packet network.

NTT Docomo also joined the wireless imaging rush when it rolled out its first 3G network on Monday (Oct. 1). Of the three new 3G handsets launched by NTT Docomo this week, one supplied by Matsushita features a CMOS camera and a dedicated MPEG-4 codec. While Japan Telecom's camera-embedded J-phone handsets deal with still images, Docomo's 3G phone can support videophone applications at rates of 15 frames per second.

Docomo's new 3G service, called FOMA, can send data at rates up to 384 kilobits/second via the packet network. Meanwhile, FOMA's videophone applications and its audio and video distribution programs are designed to use the switched network to transfer multimedia data at 64 kbits/s. "For video applications, we've chosen to use the switched network to guarantee the data rate and minimize fluctuations of delays," said Hiroshi Uehara, manager of the R&D planning department at NTT Docomo.

Despite slowing demand for mobile phones, a six-month delay in the launch of its 3G network, and two recalls earlier this year of faulty I-mode handsets, NTT Docomo still believes it will attract 200,000 customers for 3G services during its first year of operation.

NTT Docomo chairman Koji Ohboshi stressed in a CEATEC keynote Wednesday (Oct. 3) that the company has successfully reinvented its services every time the mobile phone market has slowed in Japan. For example, the company swiftly migrated in the late '90s from a switched network to a packet-based wireless network and pulled off a successful transition from voice to non-voice services, which saved Docomo from the ferocious price competition for handsets and services, Ohboshi said. Although Docomo's phone shipments have fallen in two successive months and new subscriptions are growing at single-digit rates, Ohboshi expressed confidence that his company's 3G service will revive the wireless market once again.

Technology on display

Among the new technologies exhibited on the show floor, Sanyo Electric Co. Ltd. wowed attendees with handsets featuring an active organic EL display and twin, switchable CCD image sensors — one to take a picture of the caller and the other pointed outward to take pictures of the surrounding landscape. Sanyo used an internally developed CCD image sensor in the phone after concluding that available CMOS image sensors weren't suitable for taking indoor pictures.

The handsets also feature a bright 2.2-inch organic EL display with 260,000 pixels and a wide viewing angle. It requires no backlighting and offers a smooth moving picture, the company said.

The organic EL display's brightness carries a power-consumption penalty, however. The prototype demonstrated on the show floor consumed several times the power of a current-generation TFT display, according to Masahiro Naito, manager of the domestic product department at Sanyo Telecommunications. A current TFT panel in a handset consumes about 30 milliamps, he estimated.

Sanyo hopes to improve the display's power performance "by further exploring new organic materials used in the display, introducing certain changes in drivers and devising creative solutions for a method of displaying data," Naito said. He acknowledged that the display's power consumption would not allow consumers to keep it always turned on. "We'll either reduce the brightness of a display at a certain point or put the display in a sleep mode," he said.

Scheduled for commercial availability next spring, Sanyo's handsets are designed to support both CDMA 1X and W-CDMA wireless networks.

Like Docomo, Japan's two other mobile operators also postponed the rollout of their 3G services. KDDI, the nation's number two operator, delayed 3G service until April 2002, and Japan Telecom delayed its service until June 2002. Even so, both companies are trying to jump start 3G-like multimedia services over current-generation networks. KDDI, for example, will launch in December an "ezmovie" service able to download video clips, an "eznavigation" GPS-based navigation service, and a Java-based "ezplus" application. These services are designed to run on the WAP 2.0 platform. The GPS and Java features will be standard on all of KDDI's new phones, while the video clip service will require a special handset that incorporates an MPEG-4 chip.

KDDI plans to introduce CDMA2000 1X transmission services, which will support 144-kbit/s data rates, starting next April in the Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya metropolitan areas. The company plans to roll out a CDMA2000 1xEV service able to support 2.4-Mbit/s rates in fiscal 2002.

Japan Telecom — with 47 percent of its shares now held by Vodafone — will introduce a W-CDMA service similar to Docomo's FOMA in June 2002. The company's J-phone service, a rival to Docomo's I-mode, has already made a mobile camera a standard feature on many of its handsets. Now Japan Telecom has asked its suppliers to incorporate a 3-D polygon engine and 2-D sprite engine into their handsets to support entertainment applications. Toshiba showed a new camera/handset J-phone at CEATEC equipped with "a mobile flash unit" designed to work 3,000 times without any degradation in the flash's brightness.