Japanese carrier AU isn't messing around with their new rollout of EV-DO phones to accompany their AU
Listen Mobile Service, and they're getting phones from a bunch of manufacturers, including Toshiba, Hitachi, Casio,
Sony Ericsson, and Sanyo, to prove it. We already mentioned the
4GB W41T musicphone from
Toshiba, but the other offerings aren't too shabby. Hitachi's W41H (pictured) does the DTV thing, though we're not sure
with which standard. The phone also supports FM playback, and its 2.7-inch swivel-screen should make viewing a bit
easier than your typical phone. Casio is bringing the W41C, with a 2.6-inch screen, 2 megapixel camera, GPS, FM, a
document viewer and the Opera browser. Sony Ericsson goes low-end with their W41S, including a 1.2 megapixel camera,
GPS and FM. The W41K dittos the GPS and FM, but sports a 3.17 megapixel cam, while Sanyo's W41SA and the Neon sport 1.3
megapixel cameras, GPS, FM, and not much else. Click on for more pics.
posted Jan 19th 2006 11:05AM
I thought Sony-Ericsson announced like a year ago that they were out of the CDMA business and going to concentrate on GSM. Hmm.
But au already had a music download service... how is this one different?
Why is the screen image on the first phone upside down?
Why is the screen image on the first phone upside down?
the first phone screen is not upside down, if it flips over and turns around to the broadcasting mode like a mini TV.
sony pullled out of non-jpn CDMA markets, their contract with AU is a completely different story, let alone the only produced CDMA 2000 1x and EVDO phones within japan only.
the new music download service streamlines PC and phone music collection. you can back up your chaku-uta-full onto the PC, u can also buy tracks from AU (or affliliated) and put that on to your phone. so u can keep multiple copies on multiple machines on the same machine.
correction: multiple machines of the same user
Heehee, I am so glad I live in Japan and use au, the only really good phone provider in Japan. I'll check out the camera, I really hated the lamer camera on the W31T and will hope for a really excellent one this time.
If only they would stop parceling out the features one per phone, e.g. one phone has BT, one has TV, one has English menus. If they would make an optional plug-in that would allow you to choose any phone with one feature (BT for me), that would be so much better.
Au could beat NTT at market share SO TOTALLY if they actually did comparative advertising here, e.g. "AU is the most switched-to phone company, away from Docomo". But that's considered rude in Japan.
Anybody know if you can load on music from your own cds or mp3s onto the 41T or the other new phones or is it just through the special pay-service?