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Panasonic shipped 100 million mobile phones in Japananese market

6 April 2008 22:01 by James "Dela" Delahunty

Panasonic has become the first-ever consumer electronics company to ship 100 million mobile phones in the Japanese market, after first selling its TZ-801 analog handset in 1979. The TZ-801 was designed for a car phone service of NTT Public Corp., the government-owned forerunner to the privatized NTT. The TZ-802A followed in 1985, and it could be detached from a car holder and carried around over the user's shoulder.

The phone system weighed about 7 kilograms. In 1987, the company shipped its first handheld units, with the release of the TZ-802B with its brick-like design. It developed its next model for the PDC (Personal Digital Communications) network, which was a standard developed in Japan that didn't take off elsewhere.

By June 1997, the company had shipped 10 million units. After the launch of NTT DoCoMo's 3G service in 2001, Panasonic was one of the first to produce a compatible handset for the network, which was the first ever commercial 3G service to launch at the time. Around the same time, Panasonic had shipped 50 million units.

Nowadays Panasonic's phones are like those from any other company, with dozens of features that would have seemed impossible in 2001 with an emphasis on multimedia consumption (both Panasonic's big screen TVs and its newest phones carry the Viera brand).

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Permalink to this article | Topic: Phones