DoCoMo worldphones to come out in Europe?
It's no secret that DoCoMo plans to have dual-mode FOMA/GSM/GPRS phones out at the end of 2004. The big news, if the very wild and hairy rumours we're seeing around the Japanese web are true, is that the first of these, NEC's N900iG, may be going on sale in both Japan and Europe. We can't pin down whether it would work on European UMTS/W-CDMA 3G networks—sounds like it might have to be triple-mode to do so, because FOMA's based on a non-standard spec that DoCoMo tweaked to get better power consumption—but apparently Japanese users will be able to access i-mode and email while roaming as well as making voice calls. If the news about the Europe release is true, we hope DoCoMo's other handset makers get in on the act too; NEC's FOMA handsets are competent, but they don't strike the sparks that Panasonic and the rest do. (Link below in Italian.)
