China gets credit card-sized mobile
Published: 06 Nov 2003 11:05 GMT
Japanese electronics firm NEC has designed a 10mm-thick credit card-sized mobile phone that it hopes will win over the China market.
The N900 will feature a digital camera and a colour LCD display, although specifications have not been released yet.
The N900 GSM mobile will be released in China first, then Southeast Asia and Europe. NEC will develop and ship 20 models of the N900, and aims to sell 2.5 million to 3 million units in China by March 2005. No specific date has been set for the release, beyond "soon", NEC senior vice president, Tsutomu Nakamura said in his announcement, reported the Nikkei BP Network.
The phone was planned and proposed by NEC's China team and developed in Japan.
By mounting existing devices in a limited space instead of developing new devices, and with NEC's expertise in thin pagers, the company was able to develop the N900 in under ten months, which is the same time required to develop regular mobile phones, said the report.
Handsets have been steadily getting smaller and specialised. Colour screens, interchangeable designs and keyboards are becoming standard. Nokia's recent N-Gage and Sony's upcoming Z600 are designed for gameplay, with others taking on PDA functions.
China is viewed as a market with vast potential by phone makers. With its vast population and low phone penetration rate, the potential demand for handsets is staggering.
NEC will find competition in the China market with CEC (China Electronics Corporation), a government-run electronics conglomerate, which recently launched a tiny wristphone. The CDMA-network F88 has a keypad, color screen and camera, and retails for over $1,000 (£594).
Japanese NTT DoCoMo has already started selling the first wristwatch-phone, the $290 Wristomo, but it works only in Japan, and has a greyscale LCD panel.
Motorola and Siemens also have working wrist-phone prototypes, with Siemens' Xelibri pendant-phone adapted from the technology.
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