Word: modelied
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...million Japanese, i-mode is the preferred mode of communication. Kids are e-mailing one another pictures of Hello Kitty, the cloyingly ubiquitous national feline. Teenagers are building networks of i-friends that they e-mail but never see. Office workers are trolling online, looking for love. During the recent Coming of Age Day holiday, which honors young people turning 20, mayors in several villages walked out of celebrations because students in the audience couldn't stop their thumbs from wagging. "Forget my phone at home?" Takumi Ebina, 16, asks incredulously. "I would never do that. I can't imagine...
...mode isn't just a fancy cell-phone service. It's the vanguard of Japan's hottest company, NTT DoCoMo Inc., which is making inroads and investments all over the globe, including a 16% piece of AT&T Wireless, which it bought for $9.8 billion. DoCoMo plans to wage the next great wireless war based on the idea that you will no longer need to carry an assortment of Palm Pilots, Blackberrys, Discmen, pagers and phones to keep in touch or keep in tunes. In DoCoMo's world, you'll carry only a single broadband phone to e-mail friends...
...while i-mode operates at only a poky 9.6 kbps, the company promises that when its service moves to third-generation wireless technology, 3G, it will blow away anything on your desktop PC. DoCoMo will introduce 3G in Japan this spring and then begin a global rollout in Europe, first using a somewhat slower interim technology. AT&T Wireless plans to offer a version of i-mode later this year...
...surfing Americans, i-mode may seem like a step backward. Their PCs can do and see a whole lot more than the i-mode-loving Japanese can find on their little phones. But i-mode isn't designed to compete with the desk-bound Web. "With a mobile phone, people don't have much time to read through a lot of data," says DoCoMo's Keiichi Enoki, one of i-mode's creators. "We thought people would want bursts of information while they are on the move...
...loaded with gimmicky content to dazzle and entertain Web novices. "The Internet scared Japanese people," says Yukiko Takahashi, a manager at Bandai Networks, a subsidiary of the toy company that gave the world the Tamagotchi virtual pet and created rudimentary games that have been big hits on i-mode. "It made people think about connecting a PC, using a keyboard, modems, ISDN lines, stuff they didn't understand and stuff that cost too much. The smartest thing DoCoMo did was not to use the word Internet in any of its promotions...