DoCoMo ready to take on the world again?

We were just writing up something about DoCoMo and Renesas
announcing they're to develop a W-CDMA/GSM/GPRS chip, and speculating about DoCoMo renewing its designs on global domination, when along comes news that the big D is hooking up with Texas Instruments as well to build something similar. After a failed attempt at investing in carriers outside Japan in the hope of getting them to roll out W-CDMA, and a somewhat more successful period of licensing its i-mode service, it seems DoCoMo may have hit on the approach that it's best at: hardware. The high development costs of Japan-only FOMA phones must start to seem more bearable to cellphone makers when they're dual-mode from the get-go and can be rejigged for other markets more easily; and what better way to convince carriers outside Japan to speed up their W-CDMA rollout than by giving them an installed base of cool dual-mode Japanese handsets to play with? Right, we'll take our conspiracy theorist's hat off now.