At 12:56 2001-08-01, Tony Chan wrote:
>M-Services is essentially i-mode (including ringtone and screensaver
>downloads)
>but on the WAP infrastructure.
Well, it's not, really. It's an unholy mixture of WAP 1.x, WAP 2.0 and
proprietary OpenWave stuff, but with very little new. They try to ride on
the i-mode success, but without really getting it (by purpose).
See
http://www.gsmworld.com/cgi/bounce.pl5/www.gsmworld.com/presentations/m_services/aa35.doc
>In fact, that' s exactly what Western vendors are
>calling. Yet, it does all that i-mode does, but with proprietary (but now
>standard
>thanks to M-Services) technology from Openwave. It even stabs Nokia in the
>back
>since Nokia had gave away their Smart Messaging platform (enables ringtone and
>screen saver downloads) for free since last year, and was hoping that it would
>become the industry standard. But no, the GSM industry, no doubt with some
>clever
>marketing and lobbying on the part of Openwave to the GSM association,
>decided to
>re-invent the wheel with M-Services, and guess who gets the competitive
>advantage?
>Not DoCoMo, not for Japanese handset makers, not even Nokia, that's for
>sure, but
>Openwave. This, I believe, is the main reason that i-mode was delayed in
>Europe
>since all the major handset vendors are now behind M-Services, whose
>phones won't
>be on the market till next year.
This was perhaps not DoCoMo's concern, since they didn't care more than
they cared about WAP/WML. But this time the handset manufacturers wanted to
support more than only DoCoMo/KPN and their surprisingly i-mode true
specification (almost including Shift-JIS...).
The main reasons for the delay are:
- Real technical problems with GPRS
- Limited resources from handset manufacturers (parallel with FOMA)
- Late and unclear specifications from DoCoMo
- Unclear business issues/financial problems for KPN
>Without support handsets, how is KPN Mobile going
>to launch i-mode without any handsets?
There are more than KPN with similar concerns. More GSM operators (and
perhaps especially virtual operators) than what are known publicly have
started projects for i-mode-like services. They are all know waiting for
the handsets...
And for these projects M-Services is a problem, since they want full
compatibility with existing standards. This have been a fairly effective
brake for the Japanese in Europe, and quite a smart (but a bit ugly) move
from OpenWave, hitting both at the manufacturers and their software
partners on client and server sides (us included).
It is harder to understand Nokia, and why they support M-Services. Beats
me, if it is not only for these political reasons. Nokia's own plans are
more Internet standard (OK, perhaps WAP 2.0) than M-Services' luke-warm
instant Minestrone.
Some Japanese manufacturers are still trying to keep the deadlines
(although a bit unclear with what in terms in support for XHTML, WAP 2.0
and M-Services). The three officially known are:
- NEC (at year's end), http://www.nec-cebit.com/engw/product/mobil70.htm
- Sharp (at year's end), with a phone strangely enough dedicated to BT's
Genie, very similar to Sharp J-SH04 with the new OpenWave browser,
promising support for both WAP and CHTML,
http://www.sharp.co.jp/sc/eihon/jsh04/index.html
- Mitsubishi/Trium, http://www.trium.net/cebit/ph_e_01.asp
/gustaf
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Received on Thu Aug 2 00:05:34 2001