Press Releases

ACCESS and Monotype Imaging Partner to Bring Advanced Font Display Capabilities to the Beyond-PC Market

Cannes, France – 3GSM World Congress – February 14, 2005 – ACCESS Co., Ltd., (Tokyo Stock Exchange: 4813), a global provider of mobile content delivery and Internet access technologies, has entered into a licensing agreement with Monotype Imaging Inc. to integrate its iType^™ font engine into ACCESS’ NetFront^® browser. Under the terms of the agreement, future versions of NetFront browser will offer support for Monotype Imaging’s iType font engine. The collaboration provides manufacturers of mobile handsets, PDAs, set-top boxes, digital televisions and other Internet devices with a browser solution that includes advanced font imaging.

The iType font engine is based on the TrueType^® and OpenType^® industry-standard font formats and allows for the rapid generation of scaled multilingual characters at virtually any size. Designed to overcome limitations involving storage, resolution and other factors that compromise on-screen font display quality, the iType font engine supports various typefaces optimized for the screen. Selections range from East Asian stroke-based fonts to typefaces that comply with government and industry standards, such as the Unicode^™ character encoding standard for multilingual digital information exchange, the EIA 708B (Electronics Industries Alliance) closed captioning standard in the U.S., and the ARIB (Association of Radio and Businesses) data coding and transmission specification in Japan. The iType font engine also supports custom fonts and graphic icons that display in color.

“ACCESS is one of the leading companies in the beyond-PC market today, and the integration of our technologies is a natural fit,” said John Seguin, senior vice president and general manager of the Display Imaging group at Monotype Imaging. “The integration of the iType font engine presents new opportunities for ACCESS’ customers to more effectively build communication devices for consumers all over the world. Multilingual fonts designed for optimal screen display and advanced, tested font technologies can now be efficiently integrated into a variety of Internet devices.”

ACCESS’ NetFront browser provides a comprehensive feature set that supports the latest Internet standards like WAP 2.0, WML, HTML 4.01, and cHTML as well as unique technologies that make mobile Internet browsing highly responsive and intuitive. Key among these technologies are Smart-Fit Rendering^™, a technology that intelligently renders full Web pages to fit the screen width of mobile devices, eliminating the need for horizontal scrolling, and Rapid-Render^™, a progressive rendering technology that significantly accelerates the presentation of Web page data. NetFront browser also provides mobile professionals with unique business productivity features, like integrated support for Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) files via Adobe^® Reader^® software, a first for mobile browsers.

“We’re delighted to offer Monotype Imaging’s advanced iType font engine as an integrated font imaging solution for our NetFront browser,” said Toru Arakawa, president and chief executive officer of ACCESS. “This integration is significant news to our NetFront customers throughout the world who are looking for an advanced font rendering solution that is pre-tested and fully integrated, thus enabling them to achieve shortened product development cycles and faster time-to-market.”

ACCESS will be demonstrating its complete advanced solutions for mobile at 3GSM World Congress 2005 in stand G15 (Hall 2).

About NetFront Browser
NetFront browser recently surpassed over 150 million deployments globally that include 342 unique devices ranging from mobile phones and PDAs to digital televisions, gaming consoles, and automobile telematics systems from 90 major Internet device manufacturers. NetFront supports a wider range of operating systems than any competing browser including solutions for Palm^® OS, Symbian OS^™, Linux^™ OS, Microsoft^® Windows^® Mobile/PocketPC, and mobile handset environments such as the BREW^® platform from Qualcomm. NetFront browser technology is used by the world’s leading mobile operators, software providers and electronics manufacturers including Adobe, Alpine, Amoi, AT&T Wireless, Casio, Epson, Hitachi, Hutchinson 3G Group, IBM, KDDI, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Mitsubishi, palmOne, PalmSource, Samsung, SANYO, Sharp, Sony, Telcel Venezuela, TCL, Toshiba, UTStarcom and more.

About ACCESS
ACCESS Co. Ltd. (Tokyo Stock Exchange: 4813) is headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, with offices throughout the world including major centers in the U.S., Germany and China. ACCESS is a leading global provider of mobile Internet technologies and consultation services for the beyond-PC market. ACCESS’ NetFront browser technology powers 342 different commercial products worldwide including mobile phones, digital televisions, set-top boxes, game consoles, PDAs, car navigation systems, Web phones, kiosk terminals and Intranet terminals. ACCESS’ NetFront browser technology is most widely deployed in mobile phones for NTT DoCoMo’s popular i-modeTM and FOMATM services. To date, over 150 million ACCESS software licenses have shipped from more than 90 major Internet device manufacturers. ACCESS was listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Mothers market on February 26, 2001. More information is available at www.access.co.jp/english/ or www.access-us-inc.com.

About Monotype Imaging
Based in Wilmington, Mass. with regional offices in the U.K., Chicago, Redwood City, Calif., Japan and China, Monotype Imaging provides fonts and font technologies to graphic professionals, software developers and manufacturers of printers and display devices. Formerly Agfa Monotype Corp., the company also provides print drivers and color imaging technologies to OEMs (original equipment manufacturers). Monotype Imaging is home to the Monotype^® typeface library, a collection that includes widely used designs such as the Arial^®, Times New Roman^® and Gill Sans^® typeface families. Monotype Imaging offers fonts and industry-standard solutions for most of the world’s written languages. Information about Monotype Imaging and its products can be found on the company’s Web site at www.monotypeimaging.com.

ACCESS is a registered trademark in Japan. NetFront and Compact NetFront are registered trademarks of ACCESS Co., Ltd. in Japan. i-mode and FOMA are trademarks or registered trademarks of NTT DoCoMo, Inc. in Japan and other countries. NTT DoCoMo’s FOMA service is available only to subscribers in Japan. Monotype is a trademark of Monotype Imaging Inc. registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office and may be registered in certain jurisdictions. iType is a trademark of Monotype Imaging Inc. and may be registered in certain jurisdictions. Unicode is a trademark of Unicode Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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