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NTT to Start i-mode Services in U.S.
Vertigo Donkey writes: "Reuters has a report on NTT DoCoMo Inc.'s debut on the London and New York stock markets on Friday. What does this mean for the US? Well, according to a (very) brief article in the Japan Times, DoCoMo plans to offer 'its i-mode Internet-capable mobile phone service in the United States before the end of this year.'"
Does those cute litle letters (DoCoMo) mean anything in English?
~Anztac
While this is great I suppose, I am surprised that they will not begin with the usual heavy-weight mobile-phone-friendly countries, such as Finland, Sweden..
Anyway, depending on how they package their services and what you get for the price, that may be very interesting and very cool. I'm actually excited to see that finally EU/US will be catching up with some Japanese gadgets :)
I think it means that the $400 I just spent for my Kyocera smart phone is for naught. I really wish that the cell vendors over here in the states would get their shit together and offer us something decent. How about simply bringing us to the same level as European cell service? I'm not sure that this imode internet phone is that useful though. All the article really says is that DoCoMo is contracted with AT&T. At least with my phone, I get the Palm OS. Granted, the screen is about 25% smaller, but I can still play solitare in meetings with it quite nicely. And, of course, get all the functional;ity of a Palm PDA plus some cool phone specific apps.
--- Think of it as evolution in action ---
NTT is about to do to Motorola what Sony did to them 2 decades ago.
The DoCoMo phones are so far ahead of what complacent US companies have been spewing out. Hopeful this time Motorola will wake up before they have to kill off another profitable industry like they did with their TV and radio divisions
you know they track everything you say in order to provide "Better advertisment tailored to your needs"
I can't understand what is this buzz with Imode, it really isn't so speacial in technical terms. Only reason why press and ingnorent people keep talking about Imode is that Imode has made it in Japan. And because of this, many say Imode is coming and we should forget about Wap etc... Reason for Imode's succes was it's billing scheme. You didn't have to pay by the time but by what services you used. In Europe Wap didn't make it because of billing. Now with GRPS-network and billing based on data transfer rates and usage of services, things are quite bit similar with Imode. Maybe in america people start to use more their mobile phones with introduction of Imode and it's billing scheme. But from European perspective, there isn't really a news. And one thing about phones. Many have seen and been talking about Japanese wonder phones that can do all kind of things including video comminucation. I must say that one reason we hear don't have those kind of phones is that it's not economical for mobile phone manufactures to sell phones with advanched technology. Your basic Nokia phone has technology build years ago. Just repackaged in a new fold to justify new high price for the phone. Of course Nokia has many models that have advanched features, but well... it's not economical to make them public... so... I will end my complaining and just say... Just talk more with your mobile phone, just buy new models, it keeps me working ;-)
Not 3G in Belgium, Germany, and Netherlands. The Reuters securities article is junk information unless all you want is financials. Here's an article which tells a little more about what's happening.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
This stock isn't targeted at Joe 401K or Jane eTrade, it's targetted buyers are the likes of Morgan Stanley, who will buy because it'll be worth 10x that in a couple years. There's no point in offering shares to small investors on a move of this magnitude.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
ATT and NTT DOCOMO announced a strategic partnership way back in November 2000, " to develop the next generation of mobile multimedia services on a global-standard, high-speed wireless network...As part of the agreement, AT&T Wireless will license from NTT DoCoMo itsi-mode technology platform." As well, over the past few weeks regular advertisements have appeared in the NYT and WSJ promoting the IPO that mention a nationwide roll-out of i-mode in the US.
I still don't really see what the big fuss is about these next generation services. The two basic constraints are bandwidth and device. I bet that ATT uses G2.5 technology to bring about this nationwide roll out, G3 is just too cost prohibitive right now. In that case, you will not receive a high-latency network connection with a theortical thouroughput of ~128kbps. If you have ever used DSL, you will not tolerate this for general web surfing. The bigger problem, imho, is that a cell phone makes a lousy interface to use the internet. The screen is, by definition, far too small. There is no easy way of typing in text. I really believe in the Palm.net approach with applets that cache most data on the handheld device conducting database queries to provide location and time-sensative information. Especially with the new i705 keyboard, it is easy to input web addresses. I think in the short and medium terms that people will receive certain high-value services, like email and location/time sensative databases, on a handheld and will either wait for home/office/hotel/school for wired internet use or will use wi-fi to connect at high traffic areas like Starbucks or airports. Just my two cents.
"...What is good for General Motors is good for America." -Charles Wilson, Secretary of Defense and fmr President of GM
The Japanese are far ahead with their gardets. Did you know DoCoMo offered internet access for PDAs in Japan as well?
I'm looking for a screen with about an area of a jeweled CD case. Not much thicker than that, either. Granted, that wouldn't fit immediately in your pocket like a cell phone, but I see the device as a separate component that works with your phone to provide access on the road and your wireless network at home for connection there.
Until then, accessing the web on my cell phone isn't going to be very appealing to me.
Probably 90% of the sites that people access with their phones are sites tailored to be viewed on those phones. News, weather and stock prices are obvious ones. Less obvious, and maybe unique to Japan, are train maps and schedules (enter your current station, destination and time you want to get there, and itll spit it all out), and small games and things to read during the long commute.
People who want to access the rest of the internet use PCs, just like anyone else. Serious mobile users don't connect with i-mode, they use PHS or 3G networks which offer significantly higher speeds. i-mode and other similar services here serve a market created by them, not one that existed before.
Bloody Japs... They took over the car industry, they took over the video game industry, now they're trying to take over the Internet. Well, this is our Net, not theirs; we invented it, not them! We must not allow this!
Don't buy it! Keep the Nips out!! Only buy American!!
I am truly sorry, Mr. Malda.
I think 99% of people are missing the point as to what i-mode is. It is not an internet phone although there are portals so users can get on the internet. While i-mode sites use a heavily tweaked version of HTML they are housed on a proprietary network much like online services used to be in the US before connections to the internet were the big thing. Most of the pay content on the service is hosted either by NNT DoCoMo themselves or by third parties that charge fees to your phone's account.
I really don't think i-mode is going to take off in the US for the simple reason that it doesn't offer its target market, teenagers, anything they don't already have enough of. In Japan i-mode is THE means of communicado for teens, in Europe SMS services on phones is widely popular. In the US however more teens are using PCs and landline telephones. In the US local phone calls cost little more than a line fee which puts the net cost of internet access at the cost of the phone line plus the twenty bucks or so for an ISP. Cellular service on the other hand costs us an arm and a leg and there's no one standard that all phones here use. US based cellular providers also charge differently than their European and Japanese counterparts. Landlines in Europe and Japan are much more expensive then those in the US. One market has cheap landlines while the other has cheap wireless. This is specifically why i-mode isn't going to take off in the US. Almost everyone that wants one has a PC with internet access and most teenagers have at least one e-mail address and talk to at least a fraction of their friends over the internet. It is highly doubtful they're going to get their parents to fork over them oney for an expensive cell phone that costs extra to use the i-mode or SMS service on. With only a handful of people using the service it becomes a Catch-22, no one uses the service so no one wants to get it because their freidns don't have it. If NNT changed i-mode's structure to better fit in the US it would be little better than the shitty services we already have. Part of i-mode's success is its homogeneous nature. Most pay services on it are cleared by NNT just like AOL used to clear companies to offer services on their network. The other aspect of its success is the fact NNT has had exclusive license over i-mode for the past couple years and will continue to for a few more. Nobody can come in and break i-mode's style quite yet by offering a different type of service. This is detrimental to the industry as we've seen in the US. We're lucky to use our phones for anything more than yelling at one another over the din of our surroundings. NNT might pull off i-mode here but I really don't think they will or can. The market is just too different here than it is in Japan and if i-mode becomes remotely popular a competitor is going to come out with an incompatible i-mode knock off which will fragment the market and this will repeat ad infinitum any time someone innovates in the market.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
If DoPa (pronounced dupa) is part of the i=mode offering, then it is a huge win.
DoPa is a super cheap internet packet network that runs with i-mode. You get 24x7 PPP connections and you only pay for actual packets and the cost is very cheap.
Woohoo! Enact tauzin-dingell and watch the fur fly! It's a beautiful thing, competition. Mind you, some paranoid wierdos are going to complain about how this threatens national security and all that. Some people can't be happy no matter how much they sit on their collective asses and complain, though.
Should you be impressed after reading this article?
.jar limit, and JAVA of all things?), will cost your average jap approx $500 for a one-year contract including the phone. You get some few minutes for free to use up each month, and then you pay for every minute of outgoing calls. Each "i-mode" call is billed by the packet, which means if you actually plan to do anything serious on it (which is impossible, the content available on i-mode is worthless to a general user), you'll be paying for it, as well.
I think not. Why? Well, let me tell you.
What you hear of Japanese companies in America is twisted, incorrect, or at best improperly translated from Japanese double-speak which is used to promote losing services.
So, you are drooling to come to Japan and start using DoCoMo's "wireless internet service" while taking a bus to your office, right? Wrong. The service (even the current 9.6kbps, max packet size 10k, never actually reaching that speed) gets really shitty during rush hour when all the office workers get on their phones to call their boss to tell them they will be late to work because of another traffic jam.
So, what's the appeal for this pathetic "service" that Japs have to pay out of their ass for? I really don't know. Maybe everyone there has too much money to waste on shit, or something like that. A latest 503i mobile phone with "java" (Don't get me started on that one, 10k
Let's examine DoCoMo's java phones again. They are being marketed as "cool, useful, secure devices to do your online banking, play games, and access the internet". What they don't tell you that you are still stuck with pathetic 9.6kbps (ideal, usually much worse), 10k packet limit (don't try to browse slashdot on that phone), and that Java applets can't access network except for HTTP (and only to the originating server) which means you can forget about peer to peer games (or any kind of intelligent games, wtf can you fit into 10k of Java? If it was 10k of ASM, sure, but java? Hah).
Another words, don't be too excited about hearing these news. I'd say, if you really care, boycott this shit and tell the japs to go back to their country with that I-mode crap. Support ricochet or whatever other True American company is there to provide you service - at least their CEO has a normal view at the real world, and not an idealistic "I'll make it and everyone will use it because I made it" view that most Japanese company presidents have about their product.
Another not very well known fact, is that these "sales" of i-mode units that DoCoMo claims on their quarterly reports are mostly "push" sales to absolutely unsuspecting customers. Imagine, you own a 2 or 3 years old phone, which breaks because you drop it in the bathtub. Ideally, you'd want to get exact same model, because you like it and you want to keep using it. The catch is that it's 3 years old, and DoCoMo doesn't sell 3 years old phones anymore. Incidentally, they have this nice and new 503 model which has i-mode, java, and god-knows-what-the-fuck-else that you will never use or even know how to use (503 models come with a ~400+ page manual). You have no choice, and you buy the new phone. You talk on it about 10-20 times a month, and never even touch anything related to I-mode. DoCoMo salesman rubs his hands, puts another cross on the sheet posted in his office where every employee must write how many phones they sold a week, and DoCoMo gets another "i-mode" user to report on their quarterly sales reports.
Why do you think DoCoMo says they are selling so many i-mode headsets now? Duh, because that's all they sell these days.
Thanks for listening,
just what I need...[BUZZWORD] CONTENT [/BUZZWORD]
for my phone. That translates to tracking and mapping applications to record my every move, purchase, email...etc
Does anyone actually browse via the phone ?
http://www.matrixm.com/asp/media/default.asp
check that shit out!!
with stuff like that NTT WILL DOMINATE too.
they offer the cool shit people want, while sprint and verizon are still just blowing each other...
It is able to do this only because NTT bought Verio's network backbone. (I was told that by doing so, it got around some specific restriction on offering service in the US.)
I work for a Japanese telephone company, and I'm probably not supposed to say anything about this, but the acquisition of Verio by Japan, and the heavy investment in GlobalCrossing Asia by Chinese interests is just the beginning.
American telecommunications infrastructure is just so cheap, and companies are going bankrupt so rapidly, that companies like mine would be stupid not to start buying it up wholesale.
It's not like you can do anything about it, but prepare to be invaded.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Another words, don't be too excited about hearing these news. I'd say, if you really care, boycott this shit and tell the japs to go back to their country with that I-mode crap. Support ricochet or whatever other True American company is there to provide you service
Ignoring the shades of racism for a moment, I think you're missing the fact that i-Mode's primary purpose is not to browse things like Slashdot. As I understand it, most of i-Mode's lure in japan is information and entertainment that is given the i-Mode seal of approval. They are made in HTML, but they are constantly evaluated by DoCoMo. Their content has to be good to keep the seal of approval.
A lot of the content is entertainment. Screen savers, graphics, trinkets animations and such. These people are not downloading and compiling kernels. People that technology has to revolve around "real work" or prove its usefulness would probably not understand the lure.
Richocet is a wireless internet service designed to use in conjunction with laptops. As far as I can tell, this has nothing to do with i-Mode.
All of my information on this topic comes from a Wired article that I read a few months ago.
You have no choice, and you buy the new phone. You talk on it about 10-20 times a month, and never even touch anything related to I-mode.
This is the exact opposite impression the Wired article gives. It says that i-Mode use is rampant in Japan, and text messaging exceeds voice call usage -- largely due to the fact that the culture sees it as inconsiderate to impose yourself on other people by contact phone calls in public.
Again, I'm just going on what Wired said.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
i-mode is not a protocol on the level of GPRS, in fact it can use GPRS (and UMTS [3G] and the Japanese PDC-P) as a transport. In fact i-mode is being deployed by KPN in the Netherlands and will run over GPRS there (some other deployments should also happen e.g. in Germany).
i-mode includes its own HTML variant (cHTML, quite close to standard HTML unlike WAP's WML), and some sort of application level protocol (proprietary to NTT I think). This runs over a packet mode layer, which is analogous to IP but designed for wireless (shorter headers etc - spectrum is expensive). i-mode also includes (crucially) a content-based billing system for official providers (NTT approved), and data transfer based (i.e. Kbytes) billing for unofficial providers (NTT makes a lot of money out of these).
Most importantly, NTT designed the phones and told the manufacturers to make them - the NTT logo is on the phone, the manufacturer isn't (hard to replicate anywhere except Japan). The end to end i-mode architecture is a bit like MacOS - quite proprietary but it's very easy to use (see http://www.useit.com/ for an article on this). Also, NTT takes only 9% of the official content providers' revenues, compared to the Euro wireless providers who typically take about half for premium SMS services. Guess which one has more providers, more revenues and more profits...
3G isn't a protocol either, but CDMA2000 and UMTS are suites of protocols that conform to the ITU-T's '3G vision' - aka IMT-2000, which is even more fluffy and vaporous than 3G is!
I mostly agree with you about i-mode vs WAP (see my post elsewhere about WAP's brokenness). The phones in the UK are nowhere near i-mode or i-appli in ease of use, and FOMA is further ahead still. The new 3G phones coming out this year in Europe may give FOMA a run for its money, but ease of use is still the critical issue - i-mode and FOMA seem to be designed on the MacOS model, i.e. an end to end design that is highly usable. European and US 3G won't have that level of integration.
However, GPRS is packet-mode and now rolled out on 3 out of 4 UK networks (not sure about one2one), and in many other European countries. It's faster than i-mode's PDC-P (which is 9.6 Kbps), up to 30-50 Kbps depending on cell site, following wind, etc. And of course GPRS is always-on, like PDC-P.
Phones that can do everything web related won't make a big impact in the US. Almost everybody, or everybody interested in being connect has bought themselves a PC (Mac, WebTV, etc.) that these phones will do little for them. I, for one, have internet access at school, work (from where I am posting now), any public library, and home. What would I need access in my pocket for? Another point to this is that the tech community (read geeks)are usually the main buyers of gadgets, and why would they want to subject themselves to browsing on a 2.5" screen rather than their 21" CRT?
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