J-Sky

» see j-phone.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

in december 1999 i was on a modem at home in turkey and the phone in my pocket sent text messages and did nothing else. japan already had a packet-switched web running on handsets, sold by three separate carriers, each with its own portal and its own billing. j-sky was the third of those three.

j-phone was the mobile arm of japan telecom and the smallest of the big carriers. docomo had launched i-mode in february 1999 and it worked immediately, so j-phone shipped its answer ten months later. the shape was the same as the competition. a menu of official sites reachable from a button on the handset, with the content billed through the phone bill and no credit card involved anywhere in it.

it did fine without ever winning. roughly three and a half million people ended up browsing through j-sky, against subscriber counts on i-mode that ran into the tens of millions. being third in a three-way market is normally the part of a story where nothing interesting happens.

except this is the carrier that put a camera in a phone. that decision came out of j-sky needing something the other two portals did not have, and it is the reason a service almost nobody outside japan ever touched is sitting in the phone in your hand right now.

~ the case file ~

~ what it actually was ~

the japanese mobile web of that era was not the web. it was three private networks that happened to use similar ideas. each carrier defined its own markup for handset pages and approved the sites that appeared on the official menu, taking a cut of the subscription fees it collected on their behalf. a developer wrote a site once for i-mode and then wrote it again for j-sky, because there was no shared standard worth the name.

that closed arrangement is exactly why the japanese mobile internet was five years ahead of everyone else and also why none of it exported. the handsets ran on a japanese-only network standard. the content deals were with japanese carriers. by the time the rest of the world had phones that could do the same things, the model that made it work in tokyo had already been beaten everywhere else by an open browser.

~ sha-mail ~

on 1 november 2000, j-phone launched sha-mail with sharp. the handset was the j-sh04 and it carried a camera on the back, the first phone sold anywhere with one integrated into it. the sensor was a fraction of a megapixel and the pictures were bad by any standard you would apply now.

the feature that mattered was not the camera, it was the second half of the name. sha-mail meant you took the picture and mailed it from the same device, in one motion, to somebody else's phone. nobody had put those two actions next to each other before. it became a household word in japan inside a year and every manufacturer on earth was copying it by 2003.

~ the day it changed names ~

vodafone had been buying into japan telecom for years and by october 2001 held nearly seventy percent of j-phone. the 3g network went live in december 2002. on 1 october 2003 the carrier was renamed vodafone k.k. and j-sky was renamed vodafone live!, with the same platform underneath and the same content deals still running.

that arrangement lasted three years. vodafone agreed to sell the japanese business to softbank in march 2006 and handed it over that october, having never worked out how to run a japanese carrier from newbury. vodafone live! itself was folded into vodafone 360 in september 2009 and has its own grave a few plots over. j-sky is the ancestor of the whole line, and the only part of it that anyone still uses is the camera.

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