Meanwhile developers here expressed optimism that the industry is moving closer to software standards that could pave the way for 3D graphics hardware on handsets.

In a keynote speech, Takeshi Natsuno, managing director of i-mode strategy for DoCoMo, gave a crowd of about 300 game developers a first look at two unnamed phones that support 3D graphics, quarter-VGA resolution displays and 1.3 Mpixel CMOS sensors. "QVGA is a de facto standard for this year's phones anyway," Natsuno said.

DoCoMo now has 36.9 million subscribers to its wireless voice and data service in Japan, about 6.5 million of them are now using phones that support color screens, enhanced Java, CMOS sensors and SSL (Secure Socket Layer) security, he added.

The prototype phones were using a software 3D rendering engine called Mascot Capsule from Hi Corp. (Tokyo), a developer of PC and console games. At least one company, FueTrek Co. Ltd. (Osaka), said to be founded by former LSI Logic engineers, has developed a hardware accelerator core for the Mascot Capsule applications programming interface (API).

Mitsubishi developed their own graphics accelerator and used it in its D504i phone released in April and thought to be the first cellphone to use hardware graphics acceleration.

Kari Pulli, a principal scientist with cell phone giant Nokia Corp., said at the conference his company is not yet using 3D hardware but expects it will. "The question is one of timing. There will be a cost for that and users will have to be willing to pay that cost," said Pulli.

Low cost, low power and small size will be key for cell phone graphics chips, said Pulli. "Lots of companies know how to do graphics, the question is who will do it well," he said.

Paving the way for such chips, Pulli is helping lead JSR 184, an API for Java mobile 3D graphics under the Java Community Process. The high level API aims to help applications developers write 3D programs by providing features such as scene graphs, complex collections of polygons that can be used to represent objects such as a tree or bird.

JSR 184 went out for community review ten days ago and could be ready for public review before the summer. Pulli said the high-level Java API should mesh with a lower level API called OpenGL ES being developed by the Khronos group to link to graphics hardware.

"We've looked at the [Khronos] technology and tried to make something compatible," Pulli said of the JSR 184 work.

Mark Callow, a principal engineer for Hi Corp., said his company expects to develop a 3D software engine that will support both the JSR 184 and the OpenGL ES APIs. The Java API will help define images in a program while the OpenGL API will provide a standard way to describe the underlying transformation and lighting hardware for rendering those images on a graphics processor. If no graphics chip or core is available, the Hi Corp. engine will render images in software on a host processor, Callow said.

Hi Corp.'s engine comes in versions that range from 30 to 80 Kbytes.

"The first thing this market needs is a standard API," said Sunder Velamuri, general manager of the mobile division of PC graphics chip designer Nvidia (Santa Clara, Calif.) who also attended the conference.

Nvidia could produce its own cellular graphics chip based on its own API, if it chooses, Velamuri said. However, the company is not yet designing a cellular graphics chip and it has not seen the OpenGL ES API, he said.

Nevertheless, he expressed interest in the emerging market for chips that could bring support for MPEG4 encode and decode and some floating point capabilities to cellphones.

"People once said PCs didn't need any 3D hardware," said Velamuri who helped found MediaQ, a company now selling discrete graphics chips for handhelds.

China could also be a player in the drive for software standards in cell phones. According to Norbert Chang, chief executive of Enorbus Technologies (Beijing), China Mobile, the largest of China's two cellular providers is in discussions with China cell phone makers about coming up with a variant for the newly minted Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP) 2.0, the overarching standard for Java class libraries for cell phones.

"They have seen the example of DoCoMo's success, and they also want to control things a bit," Chang said. China has about 160 million cellular subscribers, Chang added.