Sky Mail (スカイメール)

~ the obituary ~

On 25 September 1997, Tokyo Digital Phone announced a service called Sky Walker, due to start on 1 November. The handset it needed went on sale that same 1 November: a Pioneer DP-211SW with a touch-sensitive liquid crystal panel, fifty-two thousand yen for the unit alone and sixty-four thousand for the set with the charger. For that money you got a phone that could type kanji and pictographic characters, display a hundred and twenty-eight of them at a time, then send a message without anyone speaking.

The part that sounds ordinary now and was nothing of the sort then comes a paragraph later. Every one of those handsets arrived with an email address already attached to it, in the form [email protected], issued alongside the phone number. You did not sign up with an internet provider. You did not configure anything. The phone was a mail client the day you bought it, in 1997, which was several years before most of the planet understood that a phone could be one.

Sky Walker was the umbrella name and it covered two things: the short message service, which came to be called Sky Mail, and the internet email option on top of it, which cost an extra thousand yen a month. The umbrella name faded once the carrier became J-Phone and built a proper mobile portal. The message service underneath kept its own name and ran for twelve years and five months.

~ the case file ~

~ one hundred and twenty-eight bytes ~

A message was capped at a hundred and twenty-eight bytes, which in Japanese works out to about sixty-four full-width characters, and fewer than that in practice once the shift codes between character sets took their cut. Sending one cost five yen. There was no joining fee and no monthly charge for the message service, so the phone sat there costing nothing until you used it.

Delivery went through what the carrier called a service center, which held the message and passed it on. If the person you were writing to had no signal, the center kept it and handed it over when they came back into coverage, which was not something a circuit-switched phone call could do for you. Two features sat on top of that machinery and both are oddly modern. One was called Coordinator and sent a single message to as many as ten people at once. The other was called Relay Mail, and it passed your message down a list of recipients in an order the sender chose, each person getting it after the one before.

~ the thing J-Sky was built on ~

When J-Phone launched its mobile internet portal J-Sky in December 1999, ten months behind i-mode, it did not start from nothing. The short message system from Sky Walker was the base it sat on. Sky Mail was the layer underneath the portal, and the portal is the part that got the attention and the subscriber comparisons. The camera phone came out of it as well.

Then the layers came apart in an order nobody predicted. Vodafone took control of the carrier and on 1 October 2003 J-Sky was renamed Vodafone live!. Vodafone live! was itself absorbed by Vodafone 360 in September 2009. Sky Mail, the plumbing, was still running the whole time, still a hundred and twenty-eight bytes at five yen, and still able to drop a message into an ordinary internet mailbox from a Tu-Ka handset as readily as from the carrier's own. It survived its own successor's rebranding by six and a half years.

One credit it sometimes gets belongs elsewhere. Sha-Mail, the picture messaging that made the camera phone famous from November 2000, traveled on Long Mail and later Super Mail, separate services with room for several kilobytes. A hundred and twenty-eight bytes will not carry a photograph.

~ two in the morning ~

Sky Mail ran only on handsets attached to the second-generation PDC network, the Japanese-only standard that had been carrying it since Tokyo Digital Phone's time. SoftBank had already stopped taking new 2G signups at the end of March 2008. On 3 July that year it said the network itself would be finished by the end of March 2010, and on 24 November 2009 it published the release giving the exact moment: two o'clock in the morning on Wednesday 31 March 2010.

That release is clinical about what would happen to anyone still there. Customers using a second-generation phone would be automatically released from their contracts, and calls, mail, web and voicemail would all stop working. Contract tenure could not be carried forward past 1 April, and neither could accumulated mileage points or any balance recharged onto a prepaid 2G handset. At the end of February 2010 there were still 543,700 contracts on the network, about two and a half percent of SoftBank's subscriber base.

No operator ever published a notice with Sky Mail's name on it. Nobody put up a farewell page or a last post, and there was nothing to refund. The service had been running for twelve years and five months and it ended as a clause inside a network announcement, at two in the morning, alongside Sky Melody and whatever else was still standing on PDC. The carrier never had to say its name because the thing it ran on was being switched off, and everything on top went with it.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »