RFID in Japan

About 3 weeks ago, NTT DoCoMo announced that they sold more than a million i-mode FeliCa cell phones a.k.a. wallet phones.

When I visited Japan in August and in November, I didn't feel that wallet phones were hugely popular although many consumers seemed to be aware of them.

At this point, there are six different kinds of wallet phone handsets available including three 3G Foma handsets (F900iC, F901iC, and SH901iC) and these handsets can be used at 13,000 shops and 2,700 vending machines (numbers as of November 2004).

DoCoMo seems to believe that they can sell a lot more wallet phone handsets this year: the company wants to achieve the total sales of 10 million handsets by the end of March 2006.

I guess embedded FeliCa RFID chips will be more like a standard component for DoCoMo's future handsets...

via ITMedia, December 15, 2004, in Japanese. < IT News Archives 2005, Jaunary 5, 2005, in Japanese.

Posted by konomi at January 6, 2005 01:10 AM | TrackBack