i-mode.net (iモード.net)

» see imode.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

docomo announced i-mode.net on 10 March 2008 and opened it the following day, nationwide. For 200 yen a month before tax, with the first thirty days free, it put your i-mode mailbox on a web page. You needed an i-mode contract for it to mean anything, because the address it showed was the one already on your handset. What it bought you was a keyboard and a screen: the same mail, answered with ten fingers, with pictures off the PC attached instead of pictures off the phone.

It was never a very generous mailbox. It held ten megabytes of received mail or a thousand messages, whichever came first, against four megabytes of sent mail. Go over the limit and it deleted the oldest ones whether you had read them or not. Attachments went up to two megabytes across a maximum of ten files. There were two interfaces, a full one and a compact one, plus a phonebook that synced both ways with the handset.

The thing that shaped the whole product was a thing it did not do. It did not push. Mail did not arrive in the window the way it arrived on the phone; you had to go to the site and look, which meant the service only worked if you remembered it existed.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the program that existed to say you had mail ~

docomo's answer to that was a separate piece of desktop software called the new-arrival checking tool, downloaded and installed on the PC, whose entire purpose was to sit there and tell you when something had landed in a mailbox the website would not announce. A paid web service with a free companion program bolted on to supply the one behavior people expected it to have already.

That tool was the first thing to die. On 12 November 2013 at 22:00 docomo stopped the function, having stopped handing out the download five hours earlier the same day. After that the program could only report that it had failed to reach the server, and docomo asked people to uninstall it. The service it had been announcing mail for carried on for another fifteen months.

~ the bridge nobody designed ~

Then it found a use its launch had not planned for. docomo added a mobile mode on 1 April 2009 for people carrying two devices at once, and announced a native app that October. By 2010 Japanese tech sites were publishing step-by-step guides for getting i-mode mail onto the Sony Ericsson Xperia SO-01B, an Android handset that had no way of handling an i-mode address on its own. For a stretch there, a paid web gateway built for feature phone owners with PCs was the practical route for getting a Japanese smartphone to read its owner's existing mail.

The strain showed. Starting 17 May 2010 the PC version became unusable after ten at night on three nights running, out of service until two in the morning on the first two and until quarter to two on the third. docomo gave the cause as too many people arriving at the servers at once and said it could not say when it would be fixed. Mobile mode and the app kept working throughout.

~ a free replacement, sold separately ~

The notice came on 11 October 2013 and set the ending out in stages. The checking tool stopped that November. New applications closed on 28 February 2014, and the service itself ran exactly one more year, to 28 February 2015. docomo's stated reason was that i-mode subscriptions were falling as the smartphone market grew and it was concentrating its resources. The announced date held exactly; the page that replaced the service says that i-mode.net ended at the end of February 2015 and thanks you for your patronage.

What docomo offered instead reads strangely. Change your i-mode handset for a smartphone, the notice says, and you can read and send your mail from a PC browser using docomo Mail, which launched that December. That replacement was free, so the 200 yen a month stopped being charged for something, but it was only available to people who had stopped being i-mode customers. The paid gateway was replaced by a free one on condition that you bought a new phone.

Nothing came across. docomo's own page on the subject told people that after the end they would not be able to read the mail or the address book held there, and that anyone wanting to keep a message should forward it to themselves somewhere else, one message at a time, selecting each one and pressing forward. Customers who had gone smartphone-only without an i-mode handset were told they could buy an i-mode phone or swap the address across, which would destroy their smartphone mail address instead. For anyone who simply never closed the account, docomo ran the terminations itself around 10 March 2015, so the charge would not turn up on the March bill.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »