An I on Things To Come

By: Keith Hearne

Many people will have heard of the acronym WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) in connection with wireless devices especially mobile phones. However, not so many will have heard of i-Mode but are probably guaranteed to sometime soon.

First introduced in Japan in February 1999 by NTT DoCoMo, i-mode is one of the world's most successful services offering wireless web browsing and e-mail from mobile phones. Whereas until recently, mobile phones were used mostly for making and receiving voice calls, i-mode phones allow users also to use their handsets to access various information services and communicate via email. When using i-mode services, you do not pay for the time you are connected to a website or service, communications fees are charged by the amount of data transmitted/received rather than the amount of time online. That means that you can stay connected to a single website for hours without paying anything, as long as no data is transmitted. As with WAP phones, i-Mode phones use a microbrowser to view specially marked up pages (WAP pages are in WML, i-Mode pages in cHTML or compactHTML). However when comparing these two services you must remember that WAP is a protocol, while I-mode, now japans biggest internet access platform, is a complete wireless internet service, presently covering almost all of Japan with over 13 million subscribers.

Japan's i-Mode offers more affordable access rates, more robust content, and higher connection speed. Services available let users send and receive email, exchange photographs, do online shopping and banking, reserve tickets, find a good restaurant, download personalized ringing melodies for their phones, access the internet directly and navigate among more than 7,000 specially formatted Web sites.

The whole i-Mode experience when compared with WAP is much easier for users. When retrieving web content, before accessing a site WAP users must agree to pay extra charges and even type in URLs to browse through sites other than the service provider's portal. i-Mode phones have a one-button browsing method, eliminating the need to type in Web addresses.

Currently, i-Mode accounts for over 60 percent of the world's mobile Internet users, and 99.9 percent of these users are Japanese, but this will soon change. DoCoMo is currently bringing i-mode to the United Kingdom and Europe, and has already started using an English version in Japan for foreigners. This means it's time to dust off your Kanji and hop on the i-mode bus. So keep an I on the shape of things to come.