We'll spare you the obvious cheap jokes, but grabbing hold of NTT DoCoMo's Touch Wood concepts at CEATEC was a true, honest-to-goodness pleasure. Engineered in cooperation with Sharp and Olympus, the kidney bean-esque touchscreen phone was accompanied by a TV tuning smartphone with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. Both units were in the early prototype stage, with the bean shaped fellow being a mere mock-up that failed to do anything when pressed. The other guy is based around the SH-04A, and while the wood trim could've certainly encompassed more of the chassis than it did, we dig the direction DoCoMo is headed here. Have a look at Ma Earth's favorite phone (next to the Reclaim, of course) in the gallery below (and video after the break, if you're feeling extra saucy).

We're still not entirely sold on the intersection of gadgets and wood. Nevertheless, companies keep pumping out the concepts in response to our greener times. Here's NTT DOCOMO's effort using surplus wood leftover from Pacific culling operations. The Touch Wood prototype was developed in tandem with Sharp and Olympus and is based on the SH-04A slider. A Touch Wood mockup (pictured above) resembling a more feminine bean was also announced. In either case, the Touch Wood body is made of cypress without adding any artificial coloring or paint. And by using Olympus' 3D compression molding technique, they've manage to maintain the kind of durability, and resistance to water, insects, and mildew that you'd expect from, well, a tree. The handsets will be on exhibit in October at the ITU Telecom World and CEATEC Japan shows... touch wood. SH-04A prototype pictured after the break.

[Thanks, Stop Spamming]

If you've paid any attention whatsoever to the goings-on in the American cellphone market, you'd know that ponying up the dough to start an MVNO here is probably not your best shot at striking it rich. One after another has fallen flat, even ones that had millions (and millions) in marketing dollars behind 'em. That said, Japan's own NTT DoCoMo is mulling the possibility of fully entering the US cell market next year, offering up smartphones and "other high-performance handsets with its i-mode mobile internet service." We're told that the operator may start as an MVNO (mobile virtual network operator), leasing capacity from T-Mobile USA or AT&T until it decides on its next move. Call us crazy, but we're guessing it just might have a shot here on US soil if it snags the iPhone, enables all those 3G services that have been running for years on other platforms and only charges one (as opposed to three or four) human limbs for a monthly plan.

[Thanks, shinbunboi]

For Sharp's domestic carrier partners, solar power is all the rage right now, and now NTT DoCoMo is hopping up on the exceptionally eco-friendly bandwagon with the SH-08A. Bearing the same SOLAR HYBRID badging as its sister device on SoftBank, the 936SH, the SH-08A flip features IPX5 / IPX7 compliance for splashes and submersion up to a meter, an 8 megapixel camera, 7.2Mbps HSDPA, and -- of course -- a wide VGA display. You'll get one minute of talk time for every 10 minutes of time spent baking in the sun, which certainly isn't bad when you're in a pinch and there's not a wall outlet for miles. The SH-08A will go on display at Wireless Japan this month with sales following on in September.

In these United States, honest, hard-working Americans aren't asking for much -- all they really want out of life is the right to bear 7.62mm tracer ammunition, the right to patronize 24-hour burger joints, and the inalienable, immutable right to a 3G femtocell in every home. Unfortunately, T-Mobile's gone its own way with the whole UMA thing and AT&T's dragging its feet, but over in Japan, NTT DoCoMo has just announced its second-generation device, the simply (but accurately) named Enhanced Femtocell Base Station. While the outgoing model topped out at 3.6Mbps on the downlink and a measly UMTS-capped 384kbps on the uplink, the enhanced station supports full HSPA -- 14Mbps down, 5.76Mbps up (though the carrier warns that HSUPA isn't deployed just yet). It's not just about speed, though -- the new gear also supports interesting new services, including the ability to notify users when other users (for example, children) have entered the base station's range and reception of time- and location-sensitive coupons directly to phones presently attached to the cell. All this action fits into a sexy little box 5mm thinner than the version it replaces, though customers will have to wait until this fall for a retail launch.

It's not often that we have an opportunity to point and laugh at the crushing antiquity of anything in Japan. Look, don't get your hopes up, we can't really do it here either -- but with LTE, it seems like the rest of the world has finally reached technological parity. Japan has just gotten around to approving its 4G carriers' game plans, with NTT DoCoMo likely first out of the gate thanks to deployments in 2010 (around the same time that Verizon expects to have some markets in action). eMobile, Softbank, and current CDMA carrier KDDI will follow on through 2011, with a grand total of over a trillion yen (about $10.4B) being spent in the next half decade. Don't get us wrong -- we're sure the handsets will still be cooler than anything we can get, and they'll likely have the entire country blanketed in 4G before most others have just a handful of cities live, but at least they're not on 5G. Yet.

[Via IntoMobile, thanks Lauren]

The term "DoCoMo" is usually accompanied by a barrage of wild, high-end mobile hardware, so we have a tendency to sit up and pay attention whenever the storied name appears on a carrier anywhere in the world. India's Tata Teleservices -- of which NTT DoCoMo holds a 26 percent share -- is set to launch a newly-branded GSM service as Tata DoCoMo in the southern part of the country this month, followed by a "gradual" expansion nationwide. The logo's pretty awesome, the name's pretty awesome -- now we just need some Japanese domestic market handsets to go along with it and we'll be in business.

There are many things an NTT DoCoMo handset can do in the year 2009 -- tune in live television, shoot HD video, tell you whether you need to be wearing sunscreen, and pay your train fare, just to name a few. Inexplicably, though, you can't bust out a white-hot Jethro Tull solo on anything currently in the carrier's lineup, so we're happy to see that its Institute for Advanced Technology is hard at work on a modular hardware system that would allow users to attach all sorts of wacky peripherals to their phones. Billing them as "hardware upgrades," DoCoMo is showing off a blood tester, e-ink reader, and -- yes -- a flute as examples of attachments we could see down the road by the time they commercialize the tech around 2015. We're not sure why Bluetooth isn't a better option for some of this stuff, but we then again, we know better than to question a Japanese carrier's infinite wisdom. Follow the break for video of the prototype in action.

It didn't take a keen eye to realize that NTT DoCoMo's recently-announced T-01A from Toshiba was little more than a TG01 rebrand, and it turns out the relationship between the two devices is even stronger than we'd already guessed. DoCoMo just issued a press release today touting the fact that it has hooked up with Spain's Telefonica to jointly launch the phone in both companies' markets -- and furthermore, they're exploring ways to expand their cooperation in the future, including (but not limited to) "a joint study of possible services and applications for open OS handsets." Japanese carriers have a rich history of partnering with their international counterparts -- DoCoMo's investment in AT&T's Hawaiian network, for example -- but unfortunately, very rarely does the partnership result in getting Japanese domestic market hardware launched elsewhere, which is a tragedy as far as we're concerned.

We've seen oodles of dual-mode handsets, but none quite like this. Rather than boasting two radios, two keyboards or two faces, NEC's N-06A -- which is gearing up to debut on NTT DoCoMo over in Japan -- actually has two purposes. Aside from making calls on the carrier's FOMA network, the phone can actually double as a wireless access point when AP Mode is enabled. The handset packs a cutting-edge Atheros AR6002 module, which enables handsets to operate in infrastructure mode, the primary wireless connectivity framework employed in access points, routers, laptops and other WLAN devices. In other words, your netbook (and seven other WiFi-enabled devices) can hop online via your handset, and it's far easier than the wacky tethering methods we deal with today. Other specs include an 8.1 megapixel camera, HSDPA / WLAN models and a miraculous 3.2-inch touchscreen with an 854 x 480 resolution. There's no mention of a price or ship date for the handset, but more than that, we're thirsty for details on when this chipset will be featured in a handset that's headed to US soil. Check the full release after the break.

8 megapixel cameras and 3-plus-inch wide VGA displays are the order of the day in NTT DoCoMo's 18-strong summer 2009 range of phones from Panasonic, LG, Fujitsu, NEC, Sharp, HTC, and Toshiba, but a few are definitely standing out for us. First would be the unforgettable N-09A from NEC, integrating patent leather right into the phone's case; it's not often that you need to condition your handset with saddle soap, so that one definitely caught our eye. Next up, we have a couple smartphones (not to say that anything in this lineup can be labeled "dumb" by any stretch) from HTC and Toshiba -- the expected HT-03A and T-01A, respectively, which are localized rebrands of the Magic and TG01. Only a Japanese carrier lineup oozes enough machismo to make a TG01 look like a 16-ounce can of weak juice, so our hats go off to you, NTT DoCoMo -- thanks for ruining one of 2009's most promising devices for us. Hey, at least they're offering the Magic in both white and black.

Upon first read, we were inclined to believe that the words gracing our eyes here simply couldn't be true. But then we realized that this is NTT DoCoMo, and beyond the realm of feasibility is where this company resides. In a beautiful attempt to provide superhuman-like hearing to all Earthlings, the company has developed a highly efficient mobile spatial audio transmission technology that enables "a mobile phone user to assign a spatial position to each sound source when listening to multiple sound sources, such as during a game or a conference call." Put simply, the tech allows a user listening with headphones to "hear each speaker's voice as if it were coming from a unique direction, creating a virtual face-to-face communication environment." We're not told specifically how many voices the average bird can hear before it becomes too overwhelming, but we'll go out on a limb here and say three or four, max.

At a glance, an unassuming little smartphone like the HTC Magic doesn't really seem like it'd stand a chance against the beastly hardware unleashed every season by Japanese carriers, but here's the thing: it's going to be Japan's first released Android phone, which makes it a pretty big deal anyway. A tweaked version of the Magic has just passed the FCC as the HT-03A, falling into line with the classic naming convention employed for HTC handsets on NTT DoCoMo -- and the FCC filing means that it'll have global roaming for frequent flyers. We can't help but feel like the Samsung i7500 is somehow more technologically appropriate to kick off Japan's Android offerings, but hey, we suppose it's a start.

[Via Akihabara News and memn0ck]

While RIM and Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo still don't know why their BlackBerry Bold is feeling a little toasty around the keyboard, the duo has ruled out a likely culprit, the battery, as its unwelcome heat source. Word on the street is an estimated 30 people have issued complaints about the mobile device heating up while recharging, with around 4,000 units being sold before DoCoMo halted sales. One analyst speculates the issue -- which so far has affected only Japan -- may be based on region-specific software of other customizations. We're sure the pair are working around the clock to get to the bottom of this malfunction, but in the meantime, we recommend dusting off the ol' 8707h to get that retro BlackBerry feel -- y'know, just for kicks.