DoCoMo’s FOMA development consortium got a boost yesterday — SonyEricsson and Sharp will join. Both companies will develop FOMA phones based on the Symbian platform. Sharp will introduce its first Symbian phone after 2005 while SonyEricsson has not made any announcments, yet.
The FOMA development group is subsidized by DoCoMo and currently consists of NEC, Panasonic Mobile, Fujitsu, and Mitsuibishi.

BREAKING NEWS: DoCoMo announced on Friday 26th that the Sharp 901i will be unveiled on December 1st. The delay was due to additional acceptance testing of the secure connections offered by the First Pass service.

Last week we reported about the new FOMA 901i-series. Sharp’s 901i-phone was supposed to be launched on Friday November 26th. DoCoMo announced that due to some minor glitches, the launch is postponed. In their press-release DoCoMo did not say until what date. Dear readers: you have to wait a little longer to watch the pics.

As Japanese carriers are in control of the release dates of new phones and strict acceptance testing is part of their QA-process, these kind of announcements are not un-common. Better postpone a launch then having a recall.

NTT DoCoMo announced its new FOMA phone models — the 901i series. The phones are loaded with fancy features like a 2Mega pixel camera, 3D sound and graphics, a finger print sensor, document viewer, a bacteria resistant surface, flash and the m-wallet Felica.

The FOMA series will run on three different operating systems — Sharp will have the traditional Japanese embedded OS Micro ITRON — NEC, Panasonic Linux — Fujitsu, Motorola and Mitsubishi Symbian. This will be a major push for Linux in the mobile market as Panasonic and NEC are among the most popular brands in Japan.

The Sharp SH-901i will be launched on November 26th. Stay tuned for user reviews and photos.

FOMA, DoCoMo’s 3G services is growing rapidly. As of November 15, DoCoMo registered 7.3 million FOMA subscribers. The first generation of FOMA phones were not received well by the market because of sluggish battery life and bad network coverage. With the release of the 900i-series with improved battery life and somewhat better coverage — though still not excellent, FOMA gained pace. 5.3 million 900i phones are already sold this calendar year.

DoCoMo claims that its video phone services are picking up as well. Acutal usage rate has almost doubled to 18%. DoComo forgot to give the definition for actual usage rate. We are still sceptical about video phone services as we seldom see people using it.