H Curt, with KDDI offering flat rates for browsing, I see the packet model rapidly deteriorating. At the moment browsing is pretty useless although some content is available but runs up quite a bill and the eperience is very poor when compared with a PC or possibly with a PDA. I think the internet grew to what it is now because it was free. Subscription services are not that much even in the US. For example WSJ is about 50 dollars a year or 4 dollars a month and you get infinitely more than what you can get for a subscription on i-mode. There are PDA optimized sites that work pretty well on a phone. BBC has a pretty good one (not subscription based and having nothing to do with Docomo) but still browsing it runs up the meter. I cannot see the packet model holding up and that is what I associate most with i-mode (is this incorrect?). As to email, I spoke to several people from France who assured me that email by phone was happening more than 3 years ago in France and that they
were all doing it.
On Sat, 01 Nov 2003 6:16:36 PM+0900(JstJST)
Curt Sampson <cjs@cynic.net> wrote:
> On Sat, 1 Nov 2003 wbc@tkk.att.ne.jp wrote:
>
> > The browsing on i-mode is limited to the point of being useless.
>
> I don't think I can agree with that. It is limited, but it's certainly
> not useless: I and about thirty million other people use it every day,
> for all sorts of things.
>
> > Email is not new.
>
> It is on telephones, outside Japan. And it offers definite advantages
> over SMS. For example, if I'm at my computer I can quickly whip off an
> e-mail to someone's phone just by typing for a few seconds. That's a lot
> nicer than having to grab my phone and much more painfully enter an SMS.
> Docomo's e-mail is also much cheaper than SMS, since it's just standard
> packet charges. (Though they're not exporting that bit, it seems.)
>
> > Signing up for services will not catch on very well because most
> > services are free on the net....
>
> An important part of the i-Mode business model is that services are very
> cheap. Sure, I pay for my weather information service, but it's only
> about 65 cents per month, so it's not a big deal. And I get a little
> game ("Tiny Garden") and stuff, so I'm willing to pay a bit, rather than
> use the free one.
>
> If ring tones were $2 each, as they are in the U.S., I wouldn't be
> downloading many of them. But when I can get 3 per month for 80 cents
> per month, or a dozen per month for $2.50, why not?
>
> cjs
> --
> Curt Sampson <cjs_at_cynic.net> +81 90 7737 2974 http://www.NetBSD.org
> Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light. --XTC
>
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>
Received on Sat Nov 1 11:26:27 2003