Recently i-mode was unleashed onto the Dutch and German markets. This internet service is hugely popular in Japan, where it connects over 30 million people to the internet through mobile phones. Read more to get to know its features and see two screenshots of the devices.The time of easy, fast and always online mobile internet services have finally arrived for Europeans. The theoretical GPRS speed of i-mode can be up to 115 kbps, over 10 times faster than on ordinary GSM networks. Services like online gaming, weather reports, news and web shopping are already available.
One of the best features is that people are now able to write and receive ordinary emails with up to 1000 characters next to currently popular SMS services on their phones. Ordinary attachments aren’t allowed however, though you can attach links to webservices which store your images. The currently provided i-mode service in Europe is able to display Interlaced/Transparent/Animated GIFs and Wireless Bitmaps in 256 colors.
Creating i-mode websites is child’s work for general webmasters, cHTML is the language used for i-mode websites stands for “Compact HTML” and uses most ordinary Tags already widely known. The European version of cHTML is called iHTML. One thing you need to keep in mind is that i-mode cannot display webpages larger than 10kB of memory, this includes images. This limit is currently used to make sure i-mode webpages load quickly and because you pay for the amount of data transfered. Most ordinary websites can be displayed as well, but for almost all such websites you would need to use conversion services like those provided by Google and imodecentral, which convert websites into smaller and more compatible pieces. Also therefore newly downloaded ring tones aren’t allowed to be larger than 10kb, but can actually be ordinary music or voices instead of just simple tunes.
The i-mode service provided in the Netherlands is currently cheaper than the one in Germany with regard to sending emails, as in Germany there are additional costs. The first i-mode enabled phone available for the European market is NEC’s N21i, which has a 120×160 resolution 256 color display. (Here‘s a 3D Flash presentation of the phone. Double click the phone to open its cover. And finally here are some i-mode screenshots). Toshiba will soon introduce a new i-mode enabled model in Europe as well. I-mode is a great step forward for the mobile phone industry and delivers its promise where WAP sadly failed.
Is NTT DoCoMo planning to release its services on any other European country? I’ve been hoping that maybe NTT DoCoMo planned to release its iMode services in Europe, and now that they have, maybe they could release it over here in Spain, or France. Does anyone know anything about any other iMode release outside Germany, the Netherlands or UK?
And what about UMTS? Isn’t it ever going to be released or what? At least we got 802.11b….
> Is NTT DoCoMo planning to release its services on any other European country?
The next country to get i-mode introduced, will probably be Belgium. Within a year Italy, Spain, the UK and France are expected to follow.
> And what about UMTS?
For Europe you will probably have to wait at least over a year, probably over 2 years even. In Japan there already are areas where you can use 3G 384 kbps Networks. The phones are advanved enough for smooth instant video streams. In Japan newer mobiles have webcams as well as support for i-appli, a Java applications supporting technology.
imode will use UMTS instead of gprs in the future…
flo
Telia has invested(wasted) a lot of money on the 3G net here in Sweden.
Then they realized that people had no interest in it. And frankly, I can’t see why they would have any interest in it. How do they market it?
“You’ll soon be able to watch movies on your cellphone” (Nokia commersial)
Yeah.. so? Who cares. It will be freaking expensive to stream a movie to your cellphone and no-one wants to watch a movie on a tiny little LCD-display. It’s just stupid.
If I want to watch movies on the train for example, I’ll buy a portable DVD/VCD-player and a pair of TV glasses, becuase the quality is _so_ much better and it will actually be less expensive in the long run, considering what you get for your money.
Streaming music over the 3G network will also be very expensive. I really think people would prefer to buy a cheap MP3 player (which allready exists in some cellphones) rather than stream music from their home computer or their buddies.
I don’t get why some countries are in such a hurry to build a 3G network. The world has no use for it right now, and when they have, something better will allready be here.
As for I-mode. I read that some Ericsson has some solution using a wrapper to display I-mode pages. Hmm.. can’t recall where I read that right now though. Anyway, it wouldn’t give you the full advantage of I-mode, but it would allow you to browse those pages IIRC.
> How do they market it?
Well, the mean marketable advantage for general people would be, to be able to see the people to whom you’re talking to in realtime. Phones need to have webcams as well to accomplish this, like the new phones in Japan.
Also note that 3G Networks won’t work solely with 3G mobile phones but will allow other devices like i.e. PDAs to connect to the internet at high speeds as well. I believe the border between advanced mobile phones and 2.5/3G enabled PDAs would be rather vague in the future.
Imode success in japan is amazing but there are seriously japan-centric issues there including high monthly/annual subscriber rates. The people in Japan spend much more time on public transportation and outside their home than in the US and Europe. And many, perhaps has high as 35%, saw the web for the first time through imode. Content and healthy relationships with content providers were also pivotal.
It is not evident by any means that Imode can be a success anywhere else. Europe is famous for having a high percentage of el cheapo prepaid users. However, it would be nice to see it succeed because the future of the “wireless web” is seriously questionable right now.
I-mode became popular in Japan (and some parts of Europe) because of high-price (and metered) land-line narrowband ISP access —- now those countries have cheaper and unlimited narrowband and broadband ISP access — I-mode would be hard to duplicate its past success.
> Imode success in japan is amazing but there are seriously
> japan-centric issues
I believe there’s a clear mentality difference between consumers living in the States and Japan. Japanese mostly like small, efficient and elegant gadgets. In the States people seem more interested in somewhat bulky, high power macho devices. I believe Europe would mostly be somewhere in between.
It’s about cheap un-metered internet access. U.S. has it for a long time, whereas only very recently has europe and japan have it. When cheaper unlimited broadband ISP access takes its hold in Japan, i-mode’s days would be numbered.
PocketPC isn’t becoming popular because it’s bulky and high powered macho device. Enterprise-level corporations are embracing pocketpc’s (instead of palm’s) because they can potentially layoff a lot of secretaries (and other office staff) who does nothing except faxing things to their boss who are on business lunches and business trips.
Now they are to say, your department will only have 2.5 secretaries instead of 4 secretaries — so salespeople on business trips shouldn’t phone headquarter to see if a particular item is available from the storage, instead salespeople should use their pocketpc’s to hook up to the companies inventory database directly to check of its availability.
between this and the GPRS stuff thats comming out.
From the sounds of it, I’m much pref. either a Pogo (little phone, with 640×480 touch screan) or a Java-enabled, 56-ish K GPRS mobile (new nokias), which can browse the web, not some cutdown cHTML stuff.
I finally got round to using my WAP phone again yesterday, dam WAP-Porn site had gone down