Sharp Camera Phones for Europe

Japan's Sharp Corp. is reportedly preparing to launch a GSM based camera phone, according to the Nihon Keizai Shimbun newspaper. The newspaper said that Sharp has already secured a distribution agreement in Europe with mmO2, which trades as O2 in four countries. The paper said that the handsets will have a colour screen, which seems fairly obvious for a camera enabled phone, and would support GPRS. The paper also noted that Sharp is in negotiations with several other European networks over distributing its handsets.

Sharp licensed a GPRS platform from TTP Communications in January, which will support GPRS up to multi-slot class 12. Idle speculation about why Sharp wanted such a high slot capacity on its GPRS platform may make us wonder if mmO2 is preparing to speed up its GPRS service in time for the handset launch.'"

Posted to the site on 15th July 2002