Mobile moves.

While SoftBank seems to be winning the battle for new subscribers in the saturated mobile phone market, niche player Emobile--which launched in spring 2007--looks to be making steady progress. The "Mobile Broadband" provider signed up a record number of new subscribers in December. Although the numbers are still tiny compared to the big three of NTT DoCoMo, AU and SoftBank, Emobile's 41,000 new subscribers represent an 8% share of new subscriptions. An attractive sub [yen]10,000 PDA Phone promotion through January and a 7.2Mbps PCMCIA card (twice the speed of offerings from the other carriers) released in February should see a strong boost in growth.