Sam Joseph wrote:
> What is difficult to understand is why we should need
> to wait for a new packet based phone, when we can
> clearly already download applets to the existing j-phones,
> and just what J-Phone/Vodaphone is hoping to achieve
> by forcing developers through this bottleneck.
I'm sure that others feel your pain. Why not put a call into the
following operation:
http://www.kevointernational.com/partners.html
I'm sure that if you can't understand their anwers to your
question, you'll ... have all the answer you need! Hah! Just
kidding guys. Really. ;-)
Their photos of 3G phones are apparently good enough that
even Nooper deigns to link to them.
Seriously: in selling into the youth market, heavy content
controls go with the territory. The keitai is not a home PC,
where parents can set up filters, peep over the kid's shoulders,
and get the (false) sense of security that comes with this
The phone goes wherever the kid goes, you can't see, or
really control, how they're using it.
I think the "i-mode is for adults, J-Phone for kids" market
split is far more than a stereotype; it is amply demonstrated
by the differing experience with salacious spam.
Almost nobody I know who has J-Phone gets spam,
salacious or otherwise.
With i-mode, well ...
Recently, I got a new phone with my old phone number,
but somehow didn't inherit my old michael_turner @ docomo.ne.jp
address, so I'm getting lotsa spam again. I decided to watch the
spamstream for a while, to see how it's changed, and it's pretty
much the same story: high volume, mostly sex-industry stuff.
(Except that the spammers now apparently have to preface
their subject lines with "! advertising !". If this isn't a tacit
admission on the part of DoCoMo that they *could* filter
spam, but have decided not to, I don't know what is.)
OK, you're a Japanese parent, and your kid's asking for keitai.
You're weighing various options. Make them go without? You
forgo kid-monitoring possibilities. i-Mode? There are ways to
sanitize it, but it kinda gives you the creeps anyway. Then you
check out J-Phone with the other parents, and get the warm,
fuzzy feeling for content control.
Still don't get it? It's a marketing thing -- you wouldn't
understand. ;-)
-michael turner
leap@gol.com
Received on Tue Feb 19 06:34:14 2002