KG Telecom (
Company officials said yesterday that the equipment would be up and running by September or October.
GPRS, or General Packet Radio Service, is a wireless standard developed in Europe for Internet use via mobile phones and Internet devices. It runs at 115 kilobits per second, twice as fast as conventional PC modems.
KG Telecom president Jimmy Yau (
One hitch in the company's plans, however, has been the slow progress in getting GPRS-capable mobile phones to market. According to Nokia's networks manager Petri Reijonen, Nokia-made GPRS phones will not be available in Taiwan until the first quarter of next year because the company has not yet finished testing the new phones.
Reijonen said that Nokia wanted to ensure that its phones will work with all GPRS networks, whether the network is made by Nokia, Ericsson or other competitors.
Yau said that during KG's recent trial runs, Mitsubishi handsets were used and would be available when KG launches its GPRS system later this year.
Yau also said that even faster mobile Web access, called 3G, would soon be available. The system runs at speeds up to 384 kilobits per second and can deliver images and other multimedia to mobile handsets.
GPRS is also seen by some industry players as superior to WAP, which delivers Internet content at speeds of just 9.6 kbps.
While speedier connections should improve mobile Internet services, reports warn that as mobile phone functions such as e-mail become more popular, mobile devices will also become susceptible to scourges such as computer viruses.
Axl Yen (
"Once mobile phones have the capability to download e-mail, they will be susceptible to viruses, just like a computer," Yen said.
He also noted that because mobile phones operate much differently than computers, it will be more difficult to develop anti-virus software capable of disinfecting a mobile phone.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
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