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To: limtex who wrote (20933)	3/30/2002 7:22:10 AM
From: Dennis Roth	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 197128

With GPS, KDDI finds a new cell-phone audience Miki Tanikawa Special to the International Herald Tribune Thursday, March 28, 2002 iht.com TOKYO Since its creation in late 2000, KDDI Corp., the second-largest mobile network operator in Japan, has kept a relatively low profile, easily overshadowed by NTT DoCoMo Inc. and its blockbuster i-mode phone service, as well as by the popular e-mail photo service of J-Phone, a Vodafone Group PLC company. But now, KDDI has angled to make its own splash in the wireless market with the rollout of Japan's first GPS phones and an array of location-finding services. Since its December introduction, the global positioning system phone service has won over 400,000 subscribers, KDDI says. GPS uses a series of satellites to calculate the phone user's geographic location. The phone marks that location - accurate to within several meters, the company says - on a map displayed on its screen that can guide users through even the most narrow and winding streets of Japan. GPS receivers are widely used in the United States and Europe by mountaineers and sailors, and some other mobile-phone carriers have featured GPS in their phones. But those offerings do not display the kind of interactive map that KDDI's do. Its phones tap into the Internet to draw data for the map while the GPS function plots the user's precise location. KDDI's GPS feature has inspired a host of practical applications. About 50 content suppliers now offer location-linked services like restaurant guides that let users find eateries of their choice - say, a noodle shop - within 100 meters (330 feet) of wherever they happen to be. Navitime Co. sells a service through which users can display the shortest path to a destination, along with the nearest train station, the train schedule and the approximate time it will take to get there. Route-finding is possible without GPS, but having the feature allows a program to locate the destination in relation to the user, even when the user does not know his or her own location, said Keisuke Onishi, president of Navitime. A new version of the GPS phone due out at the end of this month from Matsushita Communication Industrial Co. most closely approximates the smoother experience of using a car-based navigation system. Complete with an electronic compass, the phone will automatically set the direction of the map to the direction the user is facing, so that if the user turns around holding the phone, the displayed map turns around as well. Analysts say that GPS-linked services could be among the the first practical business applications for cell phones. Most other mobile applications that have become the rage in Japan revolve around entertainment, such as screen savers, fortune telling, ringing melodies and digital snapshots. "The ones that have been popular so far were hits with young people, and that made people think they were doing real mobile Internet," said Yoshiki Mashimo, former editor of Nikkei Mobile magazine, who now edits computer-related books at the publisher Nikkei BP SoftPress Inc. Yet location-related services could find a much broader audience, "especially for people in Tokyo who live in such a vast city," he said. Still, Mashimo said the current GPS phones left a lot to be desired, mostly because the screens update quite slowly as users move forward. "It is still far behind car navigation," he said. "You need a more powerful CPU and higher data speed" to increase the mobile phones' responsiveness. The GPS receiver itself has added little to the price of KDDI's phones. The phones sell for about ¥12,000 ($90.74), on par with standard cell phones. But analysts including Mashimo point out that many people who have purchased them are doing so only to replace their old phones, not just to take advantage of the GPS function. Copyright 2001 The International Herald Tribune