EZガイドマップ

» see au.kddi.com/mobile/service/featurephone/life-support/ez-guidemap/ as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

KDDI ran two map products and drew the line between them in a single sentence. EZナビウォーク answered the question of how to get there. EZガイドマップ answered the question of where to go.

In practice that meant you bought a map. A file, one themed area pack at a time, downloaded from a content provider's EZweb site into a dedicated map folder on the handset, where a BREW application called 地図ビューアー, Map Viewer, rendered it. The maps were SVG, compressed with a KDDI XML technology named XEUS, and the whole pack had to fit under 1.5 megabytes with its points of interest included. Most came in under one.

Positioning was StandaloneGPS, computed on the handset from the satellite signal with no packet connection needed, so the thing worked out of coverage and worked abroad. The maps were already on the phone and the position came out of the sky. You could tap a spot and set it as a destination, at which point the viewer gave you the straight-line distance and the compass bearing. The release carries a footnote saying it would not give you a route.

A phone-sized map of a Japanese city, sold by a Japanese carrier for a Japanese handset, is about as closed as a product gets. The way into it now is KDDI's own press release from May 2007 and archived copies of a page that stopped resolving years ago.

~ the dossier ~

~ a world first with a footnote ~

The press release calls it the world's first service of its kind, then attaches a footnote that defines the claim down to almost nothing. The first, it says, on handsets other than smartphones running general-purpose operating systems such as SymbianOS and Windows Mobile, as a consumer commercial service combining StandaloneGPS with other positioning methods using download-type SVG maps. Every clause in that sentence is carrying weight.

The viewer had features that are hard to place anywhere. It drew a sun on the map at the correct angle for your longitude, and hid it after dark. It logged the trail of where you had walked, called あしあと, footprints, and would write that trail out as a text file, which Impress in 2007 described as a function with no use anyone had yet found, guessing you might mail it to a server and paste your route onto a blog. Each content provider drew its own marker for your position, so on the Sponichi fishing map you were an angler.

~ nine sites ~

KDDI charged nothing for any of it. The money went to the content providers, who asked between 31 and 315 yen per download, some of them monthly instead, with packet charges on top either way. Gurunavi's restaurant maps were 31 yen a file, and Shibuya had to be split into a northwest file and a southeast one because the southeast alone came to 251 kilobytes.

The launch lineup was nine sites and KDDI's own release names all of them, among them a Sponichi fishing map and a love-hotel guide from Edia called ラブホ☆NAVI, which had passed the same KDDI review as everything else. Every content had to clear that review and pay a license fee, which is also the reason subscribers were not permitted to make maps of their own. The sample in KDDI's official service diagram is 六本木 飲み屋マップ, a Roppongi drinking-bars map, with a specimen listing that reads あああBAR, budget 5,000 yen, 77 seats.

By July 2007 there were more than a hundred contents. On the service's final page there were two, a drive-and-date navigation map from Edia and a ski-slope map from Nippon Travel. That decay curve is the only usage figure the product ever produced, because KDDI never published a download count or a user number.

~ no announcement at all ~

KDDI never issued a press release about the end of EZガイドマップ. It goes unnamed in the April 2016 announcement closing the EZアプリ platform, and no KDDI release about it appears to exist at all. The notice appeared on the service's own page and nowhere else. The archive brackets it to within a month: absent on 19 July 2016, present on 19 August.

What the notice says is 誠に勝手ながら, entirely at our own convenience, which is the standard apologetic formula, and then it thanks you for your custom. Content distribution ended on 30 September 2016. The EZガイドマップ site itself closed at the end of October, so the shop shut a month before the sign came down.

The fine print on the same page is where it turns cold. Maps you had already downloaded would go on working indefinitely. Delete one and it was gone, because re-downloading was impossible, and map data could not be transferred to another handset. KDDI had sold you a guide that could not be lent or carried forward, and the day you changed phones was the day your library stopped existing.

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