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).
Get regular news updates from AfterDawn.com by subscribing to our RSS feeds using the Subscribe button below. If you have been living in a cave for a few years now and don't know how to use RSS feeds, then Click Here to read a Guide on how to use RSS (and other) feeds.
Written by: James Delahunty @ 6 Apr 2008 22:01
