DoCoMo has just announced that Cellcom Israel, Ltd. will start marketing DoCoMo’s i-mode service in the Israeli market as of today. The service, which will be offered over Cellcom’s GPRS network, is the eleventh market for i-mode, following Japan, Germany, the Netherlands, Taiwan, Belgium, France, Spain, Italy, Greece and Australia. DoCoMo sees great potential for i-mode growth in Israel, with its national population of approximately 7 million people.
Telstra will today become only the second telco in Australia to offer 3G mobile services, but the low-key launch reflects the changed expectations since Hutchison Telecom made a glitzy debut in 2003. Telstra’s i-mode service – which has been available for six months on the GSM network – is already offering 211 sites, although not all of them will be available on the 3G service straight away. “The sheer variety and depth of services available gives Telstra a big head start from other operators that have a more limited scope of services,” said tech research firm Ovum.
An extensive article in Wireless Week makes it clear that Motorola is only developing some Symbian handsets at the request of carrier partners “such as NTT DoCoMo”, which have invested in Motorola to keep the Symbian development going. Motorola’s primary OS emphasis is on its Linux/Java platform and Microsoft’s OS, neither of which is as expensive in royalties or implementation costs as Symbian, says Greg Besio, Motorola’s corporate vice president of mobile devices software.
NTT DoCoMo and Sony Ericsson have introduced a new concept model called the RADIDEN, claiming the world’s first cell phone that has been equipped with a three-band AM/FM/TV tuner. The handset incorporates a dual-front design: one side can be used as a cell phone, and on the other side is a radio designed for the 2G MOVA network. The radio features easy-to-select channels, a dedicated single-color sub-display (16.7×23.1mm), as well as visible buttons allowing the user to use i-mode while listening to the radio.
Yahoo Japan is an Internet superpower on personal computers here, but when surfers use the browser on their cellphone, that famed Yahoo logo rarely pops up. In Japan, the phone screen and the Internet content underneath is almost always controlled by the mobile carrier. But Yahoo and the other major Japanese portals, like Excite Japan, MSN and Goo, see that barrier breaking down, and they are investing heavily in their mobile phone content.
O2 has promised its new found love for the i-mode data platform won’t see it kill off its own portal, O2 Active, which is based on WAP. Grahame Riddell, O2’s head of mobile data marketing, said the network has no plans to kill off O2 Active. “We will continue to support O2 Active and enhance its capabilities going forward,” he said. However, i-mode will be sold as the ‘premium’ data service alongside SMS.
