As mentioned the other day in our FeliCa usage survey article, new services for FeliCa-equipped mobile phones are starting to appear. KESAKA System, Connect Technologies, Itochu Techno-Science and NTT DoCoMo Kyushu have got together to offer a service that allows i-mode FeliCa handsets to be used as apartment door keys. Among other things, the service will allow forgetful users to check if they locked the door from their mobile phone. Convenience such as this comes at a price, of course - there are quite a number of fees that apply to the service.

DoCoMo has announcd four new stylish Mova handsets, just in time for CEATEC JAPAN 2004. I guess the guys at DoCoMo got sick of au and vodafone outdoing them in the "wild and crazy" phone design stakes. As always, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Update: 11:41 PM EST 10/05 - Added 40 pictures from DoCoMoPress. Enjoy! -zmcnulty

They won't be releasing it to the public yet, so I believe this is referred to as a "Proof of Concept" device.

I can't say I'm floored by their features, but these are intended for the Mova network (rather than FOMA), so whatever.

The lineup includes:
-Mitsubishi's D253i
-NEC's N253i
-Panasonic's P253i

Plenty of information and pictures inside.

American readers can think of JATE as the FCC. Sorry rest of world, I don't know who approves your communication standards.

This AsiaBizTech article explains what's going o­n here. Apparently the 900iG is also going to go for approval by the FCC itself...interesting.

Article

Being that the Japanese train system actually reliably shows up o­n time, this could actually be useful over there.

Good luck Motorola, though I personally don't think Japan will be so hot for your phones. You obviously can't out-feature Sharp and Fujitsu, so I think you should go for style.

When you cancel your phone contract, and someone calls your old number, a message comes up telling them your new phone number. For o­ne reason or another, though, NTT DoCoMo and KDDI didn't tell people if you switched to the other company's cellular phone.

This is not the case anymore.

Our second DoCoMo article of the night is about a new FOMA phone made to be simple to use.

In a mere two months since the service began, NTT DoCoMo's "All You Can PACKET!!!" unlimited data transfer plan for FOMA phones will have 1,000,000 users.