Thursday, November 30, 2000
TELECOMS
Chinese telecom suppliers eye CDMA phone market
RAYMOND LI in Beijing
Chinese telecommunications suppliers are positioning to take a third of the 60 billion yuan CDMA market when this new mobile phone technology becomes popular here, China Securities News reported Thursday, citing a high-ranking official with Shenzhen-based telecommunications equipment supplier ZTE Corp.
CDMA, or code division multiple address, is a narrowband telecommunications protocol designed to make mobile phone reception more clear, more private and safer for the human brain. In October, China Unicom got approval from the Ministry of the Information Industry to offer this service, the newspaper reported.
The ZTE official said the new service would attract 50 million customers over two years. Apart from ZTE Corp and Eastcom, three other Chinese companies are working on CDMA. They are Huawei in Shenzhen, Datang Telecom in Xi’an and Hisense in Qingdao.
The article said Chinese suppliers might ultimately dominate overseas companies in the domestic CDMA mobile phone market.
According to China Securities News, overseas telecommunications companies now command 97 per cent of the market.
Also in the article, Shi Jixing, chairman of the Hangzhou-based telecommunications supplier Eastcom, said domestic companies had developed their own technologies to compete with overseas companies.
Mr Shi said Eastcom started to develop CDMA in 1996 and has set up two joint ventures with Motorola to develop CDMA-based products. Mr Shi said Eastcom was shooting for half the mainland market.
technology.scmp.com
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Samsung develops cell phone with VOD function
Samsung Electronics has opened an era in which people can watch videos on their cellular phones.
Samsung yesterday unveiled to the public two models of cellular phone which can transmit moving pictures in color at a speed of 144 Kbps, the first in the world.
The VOD (video on demand) phone, as Samsung calls it, allows users to enjoy music video, Internet broadcasting and animation, among other functions.
"The phone is more advanced than IS95-C phones as the latter could not provide color images. With the VOD phone, we're a step closer to a full-fledged multimedia telecommunication era which will come with the launch of IMT-2000 service," said a Samsung official.
Based on cdma2000 1x or IS95-C technology, Samsung's Anycall VOD phone is installed with MPEG4 moving picture decoder and stereophonic recorder.
Furthermore, the phone is equipped with a large color TFT-LCD (thin film transistor -liquid crystal display) with which one not only can view high-definition moving images but has space for memory so he can store images and view them later.
Unlike existing black-white LCD, the Samsung-developed TFT-LCD is spacious enough to handle 12 lines of writing on a single screen.
Intended to make it user-friendly, Samsung has also applied Window-type user interface and added other functions, including a phone directory handling 2,400 addresses and ability to display network games in color.
"The VOD phone brings IMT-2000 service, which we considered as a thing of the future, closer to reality. With the device, we're moving from cellular phone characterized by black-white screen and letter service onto one characterized by color screen and moving image services," said a Samsung official.
With the development of the VOD phone, Samsung is expected to also take steps to develop VOD contents and related services in order to dominate the growing wireless Internet market.
Currently about 14 million of 26 million mobile phone subscribers are also subscribing to wireless Internet services. (KMH)
koreaherald.co.kr |
