SoftBank Wireless Assistant (ソフトバンクワイヤレスアシスタント)

» see mb.softbank.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Vodafone K.K. began selling Wireless Assistant in January 2006, and what it sold was synchronization before synchronization was free. Your mail lived on the PC at home or at the office, and so did your calendar and your contacts. The service pushed all of it out to a 3G handset as it changed, in real time, so the phone in your pocket knew what the computer on your desk knew. At the time, that was worth paying for.

The handset list tells you exactly who this was for. It ran on the 904T and the 803T, and then on three Nokias: the N71 sold as the 804NK, the N73 sold as the 705NK, and the 6680 sold as the 702NKII. Those were Symbian business phones, the expensive end of a Japanese carrier's range in 2006, bought by people who had a desk with a PC on it and a reason to be away from the desk. SoftBank acquired Vodafone's Japanese arm and took the name on 1 October 2006, nine months in, so the service spent most of its life under a brand it had not launched under.

Then the phones learned to do it themselves. By 2008 a mid-range handset had a browser and could reach a mail server directly, and the elaborate middle layer that fetched things off your PC had become a solution to a problem nobody had any more. SoftBank said as much when it closed the service, which is unusual: carrier shutdown notices of this era normally give a date and leave the reasoning to you.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ five hundred users ~

The number attached to this closure is about 500 users. That is the figure reported when SoftBank announced the end in April 2008, and it is a remarkably small number to find attached to a national mobile carrier's product.

Five hundred is a strange size for a product. It is too many people to simply switch off without telling anyone, which is why there is a press release at all, and far too few for the service to have paid for the servers it ran on. Somewhere in SoftBank there was a line item for a real-time sync platform supporting a group of customers that would fit in a lecture hall. SoftBank carried it for another two years after the takeover, which is longer than the arithmetic justified.

~ one url, four obituaries ~

The closure notice lives at a path on mb.softbank.jp that is worth looking at as an artifact, because SoftBank reused the same page for years instead of making a new one. Its revision history reads as a rolling list of things the carrier stopped doing. September 2007 announced the ends of S!Cast and S!Keitai Douga. April 2008 added Wireless Assistant on its own. January 2009 brought three more, and a further edit in July 2009 added two others on top.

That matters for anyone reading these registers. Three of those services share the January 2009 announcement date, which makes them one decision rather than three, and a register listing them as separate rows with separate dates makes a corporate tidy-up look like a sequence of individual deaths. Wireless Assistant is the one entry on that page that got an announcement to itself.

~ the tense changed ~

The notice was published on 25 April 2008 and it set out two dates rather than one. New sign-ups would close on Saturday 31 May. The service itself would run until Friday 31 October, giving existing users six months of warning and shutting the door to newcomers after five weeks.

The best detail in the whole record is grammatical. A capture of the notice from 30 April 2008 has the sentence in the future: Wireless Assistant will end its service provision on Friday 31 October 2008. A capture of the same URL from August 2009 has the identical sentence with the verb moved into the past: ended. Nobody rewrote the page or took it down. Somebody went in and changed the tense, and then that page sat there for years afterward, quietly correct.

One footnote for the registers, since it cost a research pass to work out. The Japanese encyclopedia list that carries this service calls it Wireless Assist. SoftBank's own press release and its own notice both call it アシスタント, Assistant. The same list also carries an entry reading ナンバーロック, a typo for ナンバーブロック, Number Block, a call-rejection service that died in the January 2009 batch. Neither error has a source attached to it, and neither has been corrected.

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