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Is the handset war already over?
Reed Stevenson
Hong Kong : As wireless manufacturers and equipment makers from around the world try to outdo each other at a huge telecommunications conference being held here this week, Japan is silently stealing the show with its handsets."Everyone else here is showing plastic prototypes in displays, but we are the only ones with working models," says Mr Takeshi Natsuno, one of the main architects of NTT DoCoMo Inc's hugely successful `i-mode' Internet system for mobile phones, which have more than 14 million users browsing the Web on business card-sized screens. In his hand is a new blue and silver 503 series i-mode cell phone built by Sony Corp set to go on sale next month.The folding phone is Java-enabled and comes with a TFT (thin film transistor) colour display, the brightest on the market. Manufacturers of handsets - also called mobile phones, cell phones, handphones - are lining up to wage a battle over a share of the next growth market, identified as third-generation, or 3G, services that will send and receive data over airwaves at speeds capable of delivering video and CD-quality sound. NEC Corp has developed a 3G hand-held phone that will go on sale when DoCoMo begins broadband mobile Internet services over its WCDMA (Wideband Code Division Multimple Access) standard next May, the first company to do so. Copyright © 2000 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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