NTT DoCoMo, Inc. and its eight regional subsidiaries announced today that Family Discount plan members will be able to share the unused portions of their monthly data and voice allowances for up to two months beginning on February 1, 2005. The Family Discount plan offers discounts on communication between registered family members.
Happy Thanksgiving to WWJ’s US readers and for those in the UK, we’ve glad tidings of an early Christmas present: i-mode will launch on mmO2 in mid-2005, according to the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. A Reuters report earlier today quoted the paper as stating that NTT DoCoMo has reached a basic agreement to offer i-mode to Britain’s mmO2 Plc. What started with an under-attended press conference almost six years ago in Tokyo (when DoCoMo was generating some 10 percent of mobile revenues from SMS-type messaging) will now land in London. The Big Question: Will i-mode gobble up Vodafone live!’s lunch right on home turf?
F-Secure just posted they’ve had “some isolated reports of users who’ve been hit by the new Skulls trojan on their phones.” It has been distributed on some Symbian shareware download sites as “Extended Theme Manager” by “Tee-222”. If you see it, don’t install it on your phone. According to the article “the most obvious symptom of the trojan is that the typical programs on the phone won’t work any more, and that their icons get replaced with a picture of a skull.”
Japan’s NHK has announced they will broadcast one of the first programs to accept input from both remote control and cellular phone. A special Christmas Edition of the “Two Way TV World * Go Round” quiz show will add capabilities to accept input from up to four people per household. One person in the household will use the TV’s remote controller to respond to quiz questions, while three others will use their cellular phones. [in Japanese]
NEPRO Japan published a report [in Japanese] giving results of a study into mobile phone GPS usage. At the moment, KDDI/au has more than 15 GPS-enabled models (DoCoMo has 2; Vodafone has none). In December 2003, au introduced their NAVI-Walk personal navigation service with an aggressive TV campaign presenting the advantages of mobile-phone GPS.
The latest word from Tokyo street-level retailers for the Top 20 DoCoMo mobile phones sold between 4-10 November. Sorted by maker, model, and color (and link to product site), this interesting tidbit should give marketers a clear snapshot of what customers are actually buying. It’s no surprise that NEC scored 8 of the 20 positions with 6 in the top 10.
