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. |
