NEC announced that it has developed a mobile phone document viewer, which enables quality display of e-mail attachments, even those comprised of rich media contents such as images and charts, on a user's mobile phone.

Through its utilization, office documents can be viewed outside of the office at a quality equivalent to that on a desktop PC.

Mainly enabled by NEC?s newly developed, proprietary image data format technology, the viewer achieves the speedy display of images on a mobile phone. The data format technology allows the display of digital documents/images after they are generated and converted on the server. As any kind of data format can be displayed, the need to install individual application software is made obsolete and its small memory enables operation on mobile terminals. Moreover, as all digital documents are converted to a format suitable for display on a mobile phone with NEC?s data format technology, the speed at which documents containing multiple images or charts are displayed is faster than that of a mobile phone PDF viewer.

The image compression method developed by NEC enables acceleration of the display speed by double that as compared with JPEG methods due to a lighter processing load. This new compression method allows display of both text and images at a quality equivalent to that on a PC as unlike conventional compression methods, it causes little deterioration in image quality. It also enables high quality enlargement or reduction of documents.

Viewing of digital e-mail attachments is realized when the phone is within the service area. Furthermore, its easy adaptation to a range of mobile phones is expected as it is coded by Java.

NEC plans to continue to develop this technology towards its early commercialization.