(keitai-l) Re: more imode nonsense.

In the US only a couple imode handsets were introduced initially, and
with only one carrier.  This was after MIDP was already fairly well
established.  Maybe this meager initial offering was market test, but
such a test is doomed to failure unless the new device is uniquely
attractive to at least a niche (like a danger sidekick or, say, an
iphone).  But the "overseas" imode handsets here were plainer than
vanilla.

The other sore point for me, as a Java developer, was that the Doja
version on these overseas handsets was more than a year behind what
was available in Japan - and at the same time less adequate than the
MIDP platform that was already available on most other handsets.  That
was insulting.

On 7/23/07, William Volk <bvolk@mynumo.com> wrote:
> Beyond the technical there was the market ecology:
>
> 1. A 91/9 split on revenue that "let a thousand flowers bloom" in terms of
> content.
> 2. A heft data charge model that made DoCoMo wealthy.
> 3. Control over handset specification that actually made DoJa reasonable to
> develop in.
>
> William Volk
> CEO. MyNuMo
>
>
> > From: Curt Sampson <cjs@cynic.net>
> > Reply-To: <keitai-l@appelsiini.net>
> > Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2007 12:01:05 +0900 (JST)
> > To: <keitai-l@appelsiini.net>
> > Subject: (keitai-l) Re: more imode nonsense.
> >
> > On Mon, 23 Jul 2007, Nik Frengle wrote:
> >
> >> The thing is, imode was not a technology... The technology was an MMS
> >> variant, J2ME (albeit it with a variant profile, but that is just a
> >> detail, like what colour the background on the screen is: it can be
> >> changed easily enough), and X-HTML Basic.
> >
> > Sure, but that could still have been an important point. What it did (or
> > would have had even the simplest documentation been easily available)
> > was give the average hacker, or even the average joe who understood
> > HTML, the ability to make a mobile website. That was a big change from
> > the WAP/WML days when you had to buy a $250 specification, learn a
> > markup langage and page-building style, and go through Lord knows what
> > other hoops in order to get a mobile site up.
> >
> > Technologically, i-mode was a nearly exact replication of the original
> > WWW circa the mid-90s, save for the lack of of decent, cheap and widely
> > available terminals. But for whatever misguided reason, the telcos did
> > not want to see what happened on the Internet in the mid-90s happen on
> > their networks, so they made sure that the social atmosphere was quite
> > different.
> >
> > Of course, one must never underestimate the ability of management and
> > marketing to pull defeat from the jaws of victory.
> >
> > In the end, the truly amazing thing is that i-mode happened at all,
> > anywhere. Even after reading books such as Matsunaga Mari's, I'm still
> > mystified as to how anybody let this happen.
> >
> > cjs
> > --
> > Curt Sampson  <cjs@cynic.net>   +81 90 7737 2974
> >