Panasonic Sells its 100 Millionth Cell Phone in Japan

Panasonic has become the first cell-phone manufacturer to ship 100 million units in the Japanese market, it said Thursday.

The company first entered the market in 1979 when it launched its TZ-801 analog handset for the new car phone service of NTT Public Corp., the government-owned forerunner to the privatized NTT.

It followed this six years later with the TZ-802A in 1985. The handset was a shoulder phone, so called because it could detached from a car holder and carried around over the user's shoulder. It weight about 7 kilograms, which is about 70 times the weight of today's handsets.

The first handheld phone from Panasonic, the TZ-802B, was a brick-like model launched in 1987. It debuted its first digital model for NTT's PDC (Personal Digital Communications) network, a Japan-developed second generation standard that failed to take off overseas, in 1991, and by June 1997 had hit shipments of 10 million phones.

More recently Panasonic was one of the first phone makers to produce a handset for NTT DoCoMo's 3G service, which was the first commercial 3G service to launch when it started in 2001. At about the same time Panasonic hit shipments of 50 million handsets.

Today's phones from the company, like those from other manufacturers, are far removed from the handsets of even five years ago. They are packed with digital entertainment functions the most recent addition being mobile digital TV. The service is available free over-the-air and has proved very popular with users.

Its popularity has led Panasonic to put some of the know-how from its flat-panel TV business into its latest phones. The newest models carry the same Viera brand-name as its big-screen TVs.