Sony tucks Walkman into cell phone
By Junko Yoshida
EE Times
(11/09/00, 8:09 p.m. EST)
TOKYO — Sony Corp. this month will deliver to two
major digital cellular carriers in Japan — NTT Docomo
and KDDI — a new generation of handsets designed as
not just a phone but also a Walkman, capable of playing
music recorded in a flash memory card.
The unit packs a supertwisted-nematic color LCD with a
screen size about 2 inches on the diagonal, housed in a
compact (50 x 100 x 26-mm) body. A pointing device
on the front panel ensures easy Web page scrolling.
The musical handset, the first such device on the
commercial market, illustrates the ongoing evolution of
Japan's booming cell phone market, in which consumer
electronic giants like Sony are under enormous pressure
to position themselves as first-tier suppliers. To get there means keeping up
with new applications while meeting cost and volume requirements driven by
the fiercely competitive wireless carriers here.
Digital cell phones — keitai, in Japanese — have made remarkable advances
both in the technologies packed inside and in applications offered to users,
said Kanji Ohnishi, product planning manager at Sony's Digital
Telecommunication Company. "The Japanese keitai market is a bellwether for
cell phones of the future on a global scale," he said.
In sharp contrast to a few years ago, when keitai rang nonstop and people
spoke loudly into them on Tokyo's commuter trains, an eerie silence prevails
on the rails here today. Hardly anybody is talking on the phone anymore.
Instead, young and old commuters alike whip out the keitai to read e-mail,
check calendars, review weather and sports scores, play games, download
text and send messages. And thanks to the new Sony phones, they will soon
be using keitai to boogie up and down the aisles to the digital strains of the
Backstreet Boys.
Considering the growing number of functions a keitai is tasked to do, said
Ohnishi, holding aloft his brand-new phone, "This is in essence the equivalent
to a personal computer with wireless connectivity." But the constraints
vendors face in designing a phone are much stricter than those for a notebook
PC, he added.
On top of severe size and battery-life requirements, suppliers also face a
demand for more sophisticated software. "We need to put in a lot of
engineering resources, on our own, in developing original software to make
the keitai's user interface truly easy to use," Ohnishi said.
"On a small keitai like this one, consumers should simply push an i-mode
button once, which would take them onto the Internet without their noticing,"
he said. I-mode is the popular NTT Docomo cell phone system for Internet
access.
With three leading wireless carriers — Docomo, KDDI and J-Phone —
competing in the domestic market, digital cell phone makers here face the
formidable task of tailoring handset models for each carrier. Though they all
stick to a Japan-only digital cellular standard called Personal Digital
Communications (PDC), each carrier uses a different software environment
for Web browsers and other applications running on their handsets and their
services.
As Docomo, with a whopping 14 million subscribers, expands its proprietary
i-mode services, companies like KDDI are diverging by using the Wireless
Application Protocol (WAP). J-Phone, for its part, is using software
somewhat similar to that of i-mode and also following NTT Docomo's
wideband-CDMA road map for the future. KDDI is distancing itself from
Docomo and betting big on Qualcomm's road map for cdma2000.
"We must develop [handset software] from the ground up," said Ohnishi, with
"completely different versions of software for each carrier's keitai, leaving us
very little to reuse."
It takes almost a year to design a new keitai, and the product's life is less than
six months, he said. That mayfly life cycle, combined with the explosive
volume sometimes required to meet market demand, means devising a
production plan is always a gamble for handset vendors. "We feel like we are
always getting caught between chip companies and wireless carriers," trying to
meet cost constraints and predict the necessary volume, said Ohnishi. "When
we make new models, we have to determine — well in advance — exactly
how many units to make and exactly when we plan to stop production."
As more and more features are loaded onto the handset, "We do need a
common operating system capable of handling all these different applications,"
he added. Today, Sony's keitai run micro I-Tron, an embedded OS
commonly used by many Japanese consumer manufacturers. Sony's goal is to
move to Epoc, developed by Symbian, when W-CDMA rolls out in Japan, so
that software development for different handsets will become more efficient,
Ohnishi said.
Another brass ring for handset suppliers is getting the nod from a major carrier
as a "joint development partner" for new-generation handsets. Consumer
giants and telecom system vendors fiercely compete for this prize in a complex
bidding process. Even for a giant like Sony, it took several years to bag
development partner status with Docomo.
Last December, however, Docomo finally picked Sony, together with
Matsushita, as joint development partners to design a prototype for music
distribution applications based on W-CDMA. One key advantage of
partnership is that vendors get to see the detailed spec and technologies in
advance. When the trial model goes commercial, they can put a product on
the market fast, Ohnishi said.
Sony's new keitai, equipped with a Memory Stick Walkman feature, is
positioned as being one generation away from the handset that will be needed
when Docomo starts offering digital music distribution. The unit, which
complies with the Secure Digital Music Initiative spec, comes with such
security features as "check-in and check-out" of music and uses Sony's
ATRAC3 compression format for decoding digital music.
The Walkman keitai can wait 200 hours to receive a phone call and boasts
continuous talk time of 150 minutes and six hours of music playback. When a
call comes in, the music automatically shuts down. |
