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July 23, 2007
i-mode, east and west
i-mode, east and west: Last week Reuters ran a story that mobile providers 02 of the United Kingdom and Telstra of Australia would be ending trails of the Flash Lite based i-mode service of NTT DoCoMo in Japan. In the Reuters release, 02 cited limited device support in Europe; Telstra said that the services had already migrated into Telstra's own system; neither locale saw the overwhelmingly rapid adoption seen in Japan. The rest of the Reuters article said that the actual reason for slow uptake in UK an Oz was the per-minute pricing, different from the flat-rate pricing now common in Japan and Korea. I picked up the article from The Register today, which fortunately was skewered in reader comments for howlers such as "i-mode worked in Japan because no one has a bedroom" and "mobile video works in Spain because they don't have TVs in bedrooms". But Bill Ray at the Reg also raised the key points that O2 and Telstra had already launched WAP networks which they had to maintain despite not making being profitable either... the timing and introduction of a service, as well as its surrounding ecology, may be the key differences in whether a mobile service goes viral. The comments at The Register surface many other differences in the varied launches, though, and are the best read on the subject I've found so far.
Posted by JohnDowdell at July 23, 2007 07:44 AM
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