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

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.

Wasted and baked yet still squishy

[Graymalkin]

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.