docomo

Phones

Docomo Teases World To Pun Their “Touch Wood” Prototype

1:40AM Mark Wilson | Aside from a name that clearly doesn’t mean in Japanese what it does in English, Docomo’s Touch Wood phones deserve a bit of attention. More »
Phones

Japan’s Unlimited 3G Data Plans Overwhelmed By Pornhounds

6:00AM Adam Frucci | Apparently, Japanese carriers KDDI and DoCoMo are being totally overwhelmed by porn downloaders on their 3G networks. I don’t know what they expected to happen when porn services started offering movies for wireless download. More »
Phones

NTT DoCoMo Snap-Apart Phone Belongs in Museum of WTF

11:00AM Wilson Rothman | Charlie at Wired’s Gadget Lab finds NTT DoCoMo’s two-piece magnetic phone entertaining, but to me, the reasons it’s supposed to be useful range from frivolous to baffling to just plain dumb.
Phones

DoCoMo DLP Phone Projects TV, Makes Butt Look Big

10:40AM Wilson Rothman | The NTT DoCoMo prototype phone shown in the video above has an embedded DLP projector, presumably using an LED light source in order to project a respectable 20- to 25-in. video image on the wall a few feet away. The downside, as you can hear from the dude asking questions (AOL Switched’s Tom Samiljan if I’m not mistaken) is that the phone is large, or at least small but strapped to a real brick of a projector. I guess we’re supposed to admire the image, and wait for the actual mini-projector technology to catch up. [TechPertPanel - YouTube] More »
Games

Mobile Fishing Game: Catch a Virtual Fish, Get a Real Fish Delivered To Your Door

3:55AM Addy Dugdale | A new fishing game for mobile phone users based in western Japan is mixing the virtual with the actual, as competitors who hook a fish get the chance to have the same kind of fish delivered to their door by a local seafood wholesaler. More »
Phones

DoCoMo’s Child-Friendly 3G Phone Comes With RC Bracelet

12:45AM Addy Dugdale | DoCoMo, purveyor of multi-coloured phones to Pantone fans in Japan has come up with a 3G phone aimed at kids. As well as having many safety features and a keyboard designed for small fingers, the F801i, which goes on sale in Japan December 20, comes with a bright yellow “amulet.” Not to ward off evil phone spirits, but as a remote control and lost phone locator you wear round the wrist. See it, and a gallery with more info, below. More »

Update: E-Paper Phone from DoCoMo Has Ever-Changing Keys

12:07AM Wilson Rothman | Remember that “e-ink” phone we showed you yesterday? We just got the details and better pics. It’s a DoCoMo prototype hard-keypad phone that actually uses e-paper from SiPix, not e-ink, to change the meaning of the keys. E-paper works slightly differently than Sony Reader’s e-ink, which has black and white balls of opposite charges, floating in a clear liquid, which change position when polarity changes. Here, the particles are just white, and are suspended in a coloured liquid, floating up when needed. Engineers have come up with five e-paper colors—blue, red, green, yellow and black—and the prototype plastic bodies are meant to correspond with those colors. It takes about one second for the display character to change. More »

DocoMo Shows off a Halitosis- and Fat-Detecting Concept Phone

9:28PM Addy Dugdale | The Wellness phone is about as mean as you can get. A concept that DoCoMo has been only too happy to show off at CEATEC this week, the mobile measures how bad your breath is on a scale of 1 to 10 — zero presumably means you’re dead — and how overweight you are. There are other health-related features as well, such as a calorie counter and pedometer. Is this the saddest phone concept ever made? Probably. [GearFuse via MobileMentalism] More »

Wiimote-like Motion Sensitive Phones Make no Sense Whatsoever

5:20AM Seamus Byrne | So the story goes as follows: Nintendo releases DS. DS becomes instant bestseller. Touchy-screen dual number becomes next game fetish. NTT DoCoMo and Mitsubishi think it may be a good idea, announce DS-like phone. Big N releases Wii; becomes instant bestseller. Wiimote becomes next game fetish device. Same suspects release D904i, a phone that needs to be tilted, shaken, stirred and bashed against any object to play games. The rest of the world looks the other way and pretends nothing happened. The End. I mean, beyond playing Marble Madness-type games, how in the name of all that is good, sacred or uses a Hylian Shield I am supposed to play a game “swinging the handset like a tennis racket or wield it like sword”? Did anyone think about how to follow the action on screen while shaking it? Unless they are really talking porn, we will probably never know. Or care. – Jesus Diaz DoCoMo’s new phones offer motion-sensing game play [Reuters] More »