Fujitsu has teamed up with NTT DoCoMo to produce advanced 3G handsets which offer animated characters for video conversations.
The FOMA 900i series feature "Chara-den" which are avatars that hide the sender"s face during a live video call but which can change the character"s expressions in real time. They also offer Chaku-motion – the ability to have live video clips and music act as "ring tones" for incoming calls. The 900i is also Fujitsu"s third Symbian based smartphone that has been released within 12 months.
Symbian claims this shows how "platformisation" – the agreement between Symbian and DoCoMo which effectively released source code to the operator – can speed up time to market. Another first with the 900i is the fact that it features a Macromedia Flash equipped browser, that can handle applications up 100Kb compared to closer to 20K previously and Java applications up to 400 Kb compared to 200KB previously.
Perhaps the biggest advance is that these handsets offer three times the standby time of original FOMA (3G) handset yet weigh 20 per cent less. DoCoMo"s 3G subscriber base is growing too, surpassing 1.7 million users on December 11th.