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.'"

Comments

Nordic countries in all this ?

[forged]

The article reads:
...plans to introduce its hit "i-mode" mobile Internet access service in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands within the next two months.

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 :)

Re:Nordic countries in all this ?

[JW555]

Various analysts have all predicted i-mode is doomed to fail in europe. The business model as it stands in Japan just doesn't work. One of the main reasons for i-mode's success in Japan was the lack of text messaging. Europe has had this for some time, phone's and networks are nearly at the i-mode level and given 3G investment from other networks, seems unlikely to succeed. Jon (Doing WAP development!)

Re:Nordic countries in all this ?

[macpeep]

"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.."

I live in Finland and I'm definitely a "first mover". Guess what? I wouldn't get an i-mode phone. I'm perfectly happy with my current GSM triple band, GPRS & Bluetooth capable Ericsson T68 (it has a color screen too and is very small). It works in just about every country in the world, USA included. My laptop and PDA connects to the internet with it, without any wires what so ever. GPRS is pretty cheap too (depending of course what you use it for). What extra would i-mode give me over the current phone and service that I have?

GSM & GPRS & SMS & WAP & J2ME are technology wise up there with i-mode. GSM gives you something that i-mode doesn't: it works just about anywhere in the world.

Can't Catch Up

[ScumBiker]

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.

Re:Can't Catch Up

[ackthpt]

really wish that the cell vendors over here in the states would get their shit together and offer us something decent.

You hit the nail on the head. I can't imagine them sitting on their hands while 3G/i-mode enters the US (althought it's only 2.5G service being rolled out in Netherlands, Belgium and Germany, so... is it really going to be 3G in US? You know how Japan holds back cool stuff for the home market...) But it's been at least a decade since cell phone service really started (I still have my first bag-phone around here somewhere) and they've really done very little. I think this is a case of Japan invading the US consumer electronic markets, once again, like they did with transistor radios, color TV's and pretty much everything else.

$10,000 for a share of stock in technology that's actually prooven and hot, will probably start carving great chunks of market from the lazy existing vendors, well that's a deal, see? After all the money thrown at companies that are now bust or at <$10 a share, you get the picture. The stock sold because the heavyweight investors know it, NTT knows it, why bother offering stock to small fish?

I fully expect cell phone providers to run to the government to head this off, same as the big 3 automakers did, so innovatively, in the 70's.

Oh, and since your phone is a Kyocera, you might look to see if they offer any upgrades, since Kyocera is a japanese electronics company, after all ;)

This is no surprise...

[cameronk]

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.