NTT DoCoMo

Worried that you're not getting enough exercise or that you've eaten way too much garlic? A Japanese firm has come up with a phone that can help.

Japan's largest mobile phone carrier NTT DoCoMo unveiled this week a "Fitness Phone", designed to help the user stay healthy - and avoid bad breath.

The handheld phone, equipped with various devices that can measure your pulse or the amount of steps you've taken in a day, dispenses heath advice after you've punched in statistics such as gender, age and weight.

And you can also exhale into the phone and it will tell you whether its time to reach for the breath mints.

"Our primary target groups would be fat-fighting middle-aged businessmen and young women on diets," said Kentaro Endo, a spokesman for NTT DoCoMo.

A recent government survey found that on average, Japanese men in their 40s were fatter than they were 12 years ago, mainly due to lack of exercise, while women in the same age group were slimmer because they were more health conscious.

Adobe Systems Inc has released new software for its popular Flash Player that promises to bring the quality of live video on mobile phones closer to that of video on computers.

Adobe, whose software made possible the rapid rise of pioneering online video site YouTube, said Nokia and NTT DoCoMo Inc would use its new Flash Lite 3 in their new mobile phones.

Adobe said more than 300 million mobile devices equipped with previous versions of Flash had already been shipped and it expected more than a billion Flash-enabled devices to be available by 2010.

Adobe's Flash software is installed on about 98 percent of all personal computers and is used by virtually all popular online video sites, mainly thanks to the fact it works independently of the device that the video is displayed upon.

Gary Kovacs, in charge of marketing at Adobe's mobile unit, called Flash Lite 3 "the most significant advance we've made in mobile" and said it brought Adobe closer to being able to release software versions for mobile and desktop simultaneously.

"It's probably a few years away. We'll do it over the next couple to three years," he told Reuters.

Nokia's 3.4 million-strong mobile software development group, Forum Nokia, said it would launch a new development community on Monday to help Flash developers and designers.

Nokia, the world's biggest mobile telephone maker, announced a major new push into multimedia, including video, music and gaming last month, seeking to challenge Apple Inc's dominance in portable entertainment.

The head of Forum Nokia, Lee Epting, said in a statement: "Flash Lite 3 will enable us to deliver richer content to our customers, such as videos and animated ringtones."

Adobe, also known for its Acrobat document management and Photoshop software, said earlier this month that its profit more than doubled last quarter on strong sales of new products and as it makes inroads into mobile, video and office worker markets.