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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.'"
What else do cell vendors need to do to "get their shit together"? Offer you a phone that makes you a latte, parks your BMW, sends you the latest anime reviews and laundaries your whities? I don't know what's wrong with your $400 Kyocera, but my $99 Samsung works just fine at making PHONE CALLS. Ordering pizzas, calling friends, family and coworkers all seems to work just fine with my service. I don't need a $400 phone and an outrageously priced monthy bill to feel that my phone service is complete. 3G, PDA, Palm-OS powered internet-conenctivity devices or whatever the heck they are might work for self important whizkids that the marketing machine lusts for, the guys that will buy a $400 PHONE because they "need it" to "get work done". I'll take the cheap stuff, works just fine thanks.
The "various analysts" report you link to has caused much mirth for those of us in Japan who develop for i-mode.
Fact 1) Imode handsets have full email capability. I have no idea what the newysbytes analyst means by
"Japanese mobile-phone users don't have access to text-messaging technology, so mobile phone users have embraced I-Mode to allow them to surf the mobile Internet for their e-mail,"
Fact - when you send email (from any email client) to an i-mode phone, it is delivered straight to the handset. No "surfing the web" required. It is a packet network and you pay for the packets received - not for the time online. So yes - you pay for incoming mail. But not a great deal, and I would rather have it that way than have to pay for the time I am online.
Fact 2) Imode succeeded text based paging - which was the previous rage in Japan back when Europeans still thought that the digital watch was a rather cool new fangled piece of tech. So - no particular "lack of text messaging void" to fill... SMS? It's a joke.
What do you mean by "phones and networks are nearly at the i-mode level? The handsets I have seen in the UK on my trips home have been - oh - horridly misconceived bricks. I am sure you finally have one or two decent phones - but the majority of Brits at least are still using handsets better suited to use in the building industry.
As for networks - are they packet networks? Do you have the "always online" feeling that you get with i-mode?
As for comparing WAP with imode's version of chtml - knocking up a page for imode is trivial.
And when you claim phones and networks are nearly at the imode level - is that the new 3G Foma level, or the last generation, boring full colour 10k Java midlet running phones?
I-mode succeeded in Japan because the user experience is excellent - the phones "just work" there is wodges of content online, that kind of stuff. And it is a doddle to develop for.
Nick May
Fukuoka, Japan
i-mode/j-phone website developer....
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.