For those of you who haven’t read our news for the past 4 years, Willcom is a company that offers a mobile phone service in Japan, based on PHS (a remote relative of GSM that needs you to be close to a terminal to make phone calls). Even if PHS has been somewhat abandoned for voice communications, it remains a killer system for data communications, offering speeds of up to 204Kbps (GPRS is 32 and UMTS is 384) at an ultra competitive price. That’s it for PHS.

Today, Willcom was at the WPC Expo presenting their latest new products, including a WSIM PHS card reader using the Express34 port. This will free up quite a number of recent Mac and PC laptop owners out there!
The WS008HA card has 256MB of internal memory and several applications such as Thunderbird, a RSS reader…

Willcom also presented a phone equipped with the WSIM card, which is a nice alternative to the KDDI infobar. It has a real Internet browser with NetFront, and support for POP and SMTP.

If you’re not familiar with WSIM, it is a small module that plugs itself into different products, to add phoning capabilities. So it’s roughly a small telephone the size of an SD card.