Nick May wrote:
> keitai-l@appelsiini.net writes:
> b
> >ut do
> >the people living in Japan on this list see J-Phone as the young and
> >hungry
> >ones coming up with all the cool ideas?
>
> they started badly as I recollect - mml, no headers on the requests their
> phones sent to servers. But on the handset side i think they do jpeg (very
> nice) and have lots of little addon (cameras and the like) that plug in to
> the later phones. One reason why the young like them is that their
> handsets are cheap and users can upgrade for a small fee. Their underlying
> network tech is behind docomo I think - but they ARE hungry.
This is accurate for J-SkyWeb, but not quite the full story. Way before
i-mode was introduced (and before the idea of "WAP" had even been
invented), in around 1996-7 if I recall correctly, J-Phone had a service
called "J-SkyWalker", which piggybacked on top of the Japanese short
message protocol and allowed its users to do all sorts of webby things
like chatting and playing games. It was relatively popular, but their
model got a few crucial things wrong (no Internet e-mail, for one)
and was hobbled by the inherent limitations of abusing an existing
system. Still, nobody else at the time had anything like it, and
it was one of the inspirations for i-mode.
(J-SkyWalker was not my cup of tea even back when I worked in
building keitais and it has been a while, so somebody correct me if
I got the details wrong...)
Cheers,
--
Jani Patokallio (jpatokal@iki.fi) / HCI Lab, University of Tokyo
[漸] Get with it, space ghost the force soul weapon
[ Did you check the archives? http://www.appelsiini.net/keitai-l/ ]
Received on Wed May 23 10:34:15 2001