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Singapore’s Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) is testing a free wireless Internet service ahead of the annual meeting of the boards of governors of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, which take place this month in Singapore.

In light of Arjen’s recent considered advice to the networks about winning the number portability battle ahead, it’s timely that KDDI fired the first dozen shots yesterday by launching a slew of new handsets in Japan.

Although it seems like something technologically advanced Japan should have had for years, it won’t be until October 24 this year that mobile number portability (MNP) will be finally introduced to the benefit of mobile phone users here.

The feud between “celebrities” Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan has taken a turn for the geeky, with a small fake Caller ID seller accusing Hilton of hacking into voicemail accounts on an un-named mobile phone network.

Microsoft isn’t the only company re-issuing security patches this month. Intel plans to re-release a critical security patch for its Centrino platform because of a memory hogging bug.

So, you’re a hip young thing in demand on the Hong Kong guys-sitting-on-sofas scene but you’re faced with that age-old problem of where to keep your Sharp GZ100 cellphone — just what to do, eh?

Thursday, August 31 sees the residents of Tokyo officially enter the really, really high-tech age when NTT DoCoMo launches its first HSDPA service and handset, offering cellphone downloads at up to 3.6Mbps.

German chip maker Infineon Technologies will supply chips for new electronic passports that the U.S. will begin issuing in the coming weeks. Of the 15 million e-passports to be issued by the end of the year, several million of them will be equipped with Infineon chips, the manufacturer said.

Samsung has developed a music-playing cellphone with 8GB of built-in flash memory — that’s double the amount of memory in Apple’s largest-capacity iPod nano.

CDMA cellphone subscribers in Japan should see faster upload and download speeds later this year with an upgrade by operator KDDI, the carrier said Tuesday.

Software in the Skype PC client that enhances call quality is now coming to dedicated devices such as mobile phones that use the peer-to-peer voice service.

Lufthansa’s in-flight Internet service could be grounded and the company isn’t happy. “We’re going to be very disappointed if we can’t provide this service, which many of our customers, especially on long flights to North America and Asia, have really come to appreciate,” said Lufthansa spokesman Michael Lamberty in an interview Friday.

KDDI has become the first major Japanese phone company to describe just how thoroughly it’ll gouge customers when number portability becomes available here on October 24.

And what a miserable, boring, wretchedly uninspiring lump of ugly gray it is as well.

Here’s a new spin on using GPS to hinder auto theft. A Japanese company called Web System has developed a device that notifies owners when their autos have gone AWOL, and the owners can use a mobile phone to stop thieves from starting the engine.

A company called Shelly is selling Hello Kitty RFID card protection. You just cover your card, for example a Suica, with the orifice-challenged feline, and say bye-bye to skimming attacks.

KDDI admitted earlier in the week that two of its handsets were prone to unexpected power-downs after sending or receiving email containing the characters “%,” “n” or “S.”

Although currently invitation only, Gree is an intriguing little Japanese social-networking site that now specialises in video sharing from mobile devices. It previously was limited to still images.

Sprint Nextel, not satisfied with just 3G mobile data, will roll out a faster 4G network using WiMax later this year.

Sony yesterday unveiled a wireless-enabled device aimed primarily at people who like to send text messages and make free calls over the Internet.

One of the benefits of VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) is that it lets enterprises turn their wireless LANs into part of the voice network. But not all wireless LANs are equal to the task.

Those would-be masters of the cellphone universe, Samsung, dropped us a friendly line to say that their 1.8Mbps HSDPA/EDGE handset has just gone on sale in France and Germany.

Verizon yesterday announced a digital music player called Chocolate, which uses a cellphone made by LG to play songs downloaded over Verizon’s wireless network.

Samsung’s SCH-B500 is not just the universe’s thinnest satellite TV- and radio-receiving S-DMB cellphone, it also happens to be so outrageously desirable even trained “spokesmodels” have to hold the thing at arm’s length if they want to escape with (mostly) unsinged facial hair.

NEC and Panasonic have agreed to work together on basic development of cellphone handsets, and with Texas Instruments on a common core hardware platform for future handsets, the companies said late Thursday.

Things are pretty different here in Nippon; take cellphones — unlike in the GSM markets, Japanese carriers compete with each other mainly through handset features co-developed with the manufacturers, giving the networks massive power and influence.

If phrases like “It’s a stale CD player, “The knob doesn’t turn” and “The outer scene is in sight” jog any memories then you’re obviously one of the many who has savored the “delights” of Crimson Room, an online Flash game by Toshimitsu Takagi from 2004.

NEC and Panasonic may establish a joint venture to develop software for cellphone handsets, the companies said Tuesday.

A U.K. company has come up with a way to use mobile phones for a new type of customer incentive program that’s starting to catch on in supermarkets in Asia.

German chip maker Infineon Technologies has designed a core transceiver for a new generation of system-on-chip semiconductors that will allow consumer electronic devices, such as mobile phones and PCs, to send or receive data at high speeds over the airwaves, the company said this week.

Mobile phone users could soon be uploading data at a rate of 2Mbps per second thanks to a new chip being demonstrated this week by Qualcomm.

Hewlett-Packard researchers have developed a memory chip with wireless networking capabilities that is roughly the same size as a grain of rice, the company said Monday.

Samsung has just hit the Italian market with the world’s first UMA mobile phone. The technology is a fixed-mobile convergence standard that allows handsets to seamlessly switch from using a cell network to VoIP over Wi-Fi without user intervention.

Ah-ha! The plot surrounding DoCoMo’s fuel cell efforts thickens. After talking for years about how it was developing a super-duper fuel cell with Fujitsu, about which it has now gone strangely quiet, DoCoMo has just come out of stealth mode and fessed up that it’s in fact working with Aquafairy on a cell that’s twice as powerful as last year’s Fujitsu jobbie.

Taiwan’s High Tech Computer (HTC) will enter the Japan market for the first time later this month when it begins selling a Windows Mobile-based smart phone with NTT DoCoMo, the two companies said Wednesday.

The number of cellphones in Japan using the Symbian operating system has hit 10 million, Symbian said Wednesday.

It seems odd to me that 43% of Japanese respondents to a recent survey about their morning rising habits do so to the sound of a mobile phone’s alarm. Apparently, the keitai is by far the most common means of morning stimulation.

NTT DoCoMo has started shopping for equipment for a future Super 3G network that will carry data many times faster than current third-generation technology, allowing 100Mbps downloads to cellphones.

As we’ve seen before in our regular analyses of what the major wireless networks in Japan are up to, KDDI is leading in mobile music and Willcom in smartphones, so today we’ll examine how NTT DoCoMo is setting the trend with mobile e-money services.

While backers say free Wi-Fi in San Francisco will bring a wide range of benefits and critics fear a Googlistic Big Brother, ordinary locals and visitors in the city by the bay have other takes on the controversy — or don’t even know about it.