UQ Communications – a Japanese consortium led by KDDI and also including Intel, JR East, Kyocera and several banks – launches a commercial Mobile Wimax trial service at Tokyo, Yokohama and Kawasaki. Nagoya and Osaka will also go online in June. This means the major areas of Japan will be covered at a 40$ monthly flat-rate, a rather interesting fee.

They also will offer a Wifi service on Shinkansen trains that will be available for all customers by September (though some commercial clients will have it by March).

We’ll have to wait patiently until we see this in Europe.

Via WirelessWatch

HTC keeps developing good products, and HTC MAX G4 is one more case, which is the first device that supports WiMax technology.

So far, this device is only available in Rusia, by Scartel operator and its Yota service, bad news for us…   Yota provides services like on-demand online movies, videogames, maps, TV programs, free 13 channels, ebooks catalog and 50.000 music tracks for downloading. The service will start on 26th November. Ad official info can be checked here (just in Russian).

Main features are:

• GSM/WiMax: it includes WiMax for internet connection and VoIP telephony calls! If the call destination doesn’t support VoIP, it will use GSM tech. This means 79 Mb/seg speed…
• Screen: it has a 3.8 inches touch screen with 800×480 pixels resolution (like Touch HD).
• Storage: 8GB.
• Connectivity: EDGE, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS.
• FM radio
• 2 cameras: frontside camera is for videoconference and has VGA resolution. Backside camera is for taking pictures and has a 5 Megapixels resolution and autofocus.
• O.S.: Windows Mobile 6.1 with TouchFlo3D.

You can find more tech features in the official site of Yota, but just in Russian…

Will this be the new iPhone killer? Let’s see…

Via Xataka | Yota

As part of the FET’s (Taiwan’s Far EasTone Telecom) role in the national M-Taiwan project, Motorola announced that he has secured two new contracts for WIMAX network infrastructure. The WiMAX network deployment is actually the largest roll out in Taiwan.

Jeffey Gee, executive vice president, Network Technology of Far EasTone Telecom, declared: “Underlying the M-Taiwan project is a complete WiMAX ecosystem to create city-wide broadband network in order to roll out integrated mobile services. As this is a crucial element of the project, we have turned to Motorola for its expertise to design, supply, and deploy a world-class network that will support a multi-vendor environment while enabling future growth as well.”

The project will be executed in 2-phases. The first implementation will commence in October 2007 and is expected to be completed by end December, 2007. The second phase is expected to be completed in early 2008.

Via Cellular-News