A nice idea, but is this a useful one for us?

Have you imagine a mobile phone which could exhale a customizable fragrance? Now NTT DoCoMo gives us a chance to reach that era.

NTT Communications Corp, a unit of famous Japanese NTT DoCoMo has begun to test this somewhat called “Mobile Fragrance Communication” kit started on Thursday, April 10 to April 20. The company used 20 testers - men and women - which each of them got a mobile phone and a fragrance device (seems to mimics an air freshener. see the picture above).

This air freshener-like gadget (aroma generator) will cost users less than 20,000 yen and stores 16 fragrances capable of creating 700 aromas. Well, that’s a lot of smell too. Not only that, NTT also gave five testers a Service Gateway modules, which control operation of devices in the Mobile Fragrance Communication system.

How does it works? James Sherwood from Register Hardware UK have a nice stuff to show you here:

Users download pong playlist onto the mobile, which communicates with the MFC by infrared. The smell system comes with a set of essence cartridges pre-loaded.

Music and animated content can also be included in the playlist, allowing users to enjoy songs and cartoons to the accompaniment of an appropriate niff.

DoCoMo is also testing a service gateway used to control the MFC kit remotely. This allows users to, say, pre-set the system from their office to deliver whiffs of calming lavender when they arrive home.

I hope I am not too late for this news. The release has been published since April 7, 2008. You can check it in Yahoo! News, Information Week, Market Watch, or Mobile Whack. However, post from Mr Sherwood is the rocket one so I grab your feed then.

Source: Yahoo! News, Information Week, Market Watch, Mobile Whack, MobileCrunch, and RegHardware

Image courtesy of Register Hardware UK

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 Print Posted by Wim Permana on April 12th, 2008