Clicking the buttons of her tiny silver i-modecompatible mobile phone costs Ms Miyuki Hasegawa almost one-eighth of the 80,000 yen she earns each month as a part-time waitress. But the 20-year-old student thinks its well worth her hardearned cash.
She, like most devotees of NTT DoCoMo's i-mode service, uses her three-ounce handset to swap emails and surf entertainment-related Web sites to download video games and short melodies from a selection of thousands, including the English national anthem, God Save the Queen.
Were Ms Hasegawa of a more serious disposition, she could also use the phone for more weighty matters. She could transfer money from her bank account, check job listings, improve her lamentable English through an i-mode Web site operated by an American in Osaka, or if she had a foreign currency account, receive e-mails from her bank alerting her to any sudden movements in the money markets.
Ms Hasegawa also, of course, uses the handset to make phone calls, though according to research by InfoCom Research, more people (42 per cent) use i-mode phones primarily for sending e-mail than the 34 per cent who use it mainly for making calls.
Indeed, local media here reported a survey revealing that about eight in 10 university students check their e-mail during lectures and the vast majority of those have used class time to send replies.
The i-mode service has been an unprecedented success for DoCoMo, a subsidiary of the former public phone monopoly NTT Corp which has long dominated the mobile phone market here.
It has consistently beaten its own targets and independent analysts' estimates for i-mode subscriber recruitment, signing up more than 13 million people, or almost one in four of Japan's mobile phone users, since it was introduced in February 1999. With around 40,000-50,000 people signing up every day, DoCoMo is managing to sweep up around 80 per cent of new phone subscribers, whose numbers are dwindling as the market for mobile phones among Japan's 126 million people heads toward saturation. Massive use at peak times has also been partly responsible for bringing the i-mode system down an average of about once a week since the beginning of this year.
The "Internet in your pocket" concept is the key to i-mode's success. The 9,800 bytes per second downloading speed which i-mode phones can manage is just more than one-fifth the speed of an average personal computer. This is slow for accessing regular Web sites but the some 27,000 Net sites especially created for i-mode users are designed simply to keep the byte size to a minimum.
Charges are paid per byte downloaded and not transmission time. It costs about 3 pence to send an e-mail equivalent in size to around 40 English words and half that to receive e-mails. Checking a listed telephone number costs around one quarter the 80 pence which another NTT group company charges for its regular directory enquiries.
NTT DoCoMo is enjoying an impressive return on its total i-mode investment of around £220 million (€280 million). The company says its i-mode customers spend an average of £10 per month to download data as well as a further £67 for talking into the phone.
That level of spending on mobile communication is hurting other retailers, such as CD shops, which rely on young customers. Car maker Nissan, anxious to lose its old-fogey image, recently ran a TV ad proclaiming, slightly disingenuously, that people could buy a Nissan March (known in Ireland as the Micra) on monthly payments below the average mobile phone bill.
According to InfoCom Research data, almost half of subscribers have used it for shopping online, though the vast majority of the goods purchased were melodies and animation images.
The i-mode craze is part of a wider mobile phone marketing frenzy that has seen franchise stores spring up in recent years, staffed with sales personnel so enthusiastic that they sometimes falsely inflate store sales figures to qualify for incentive payments from agents.
The i-mode success also provides a solid base for NTT DoCoMo's venture into 3G (third-generation) mobile communication. There are doubts about whether the firm can get a return on the approximately £9 billion it says it is pouring into 3G. The government, though, which owns 67 per cent of DoCoMo's parent, is certainly making things easier by refusing to follow the European route of putting the licences up for auction.
Instead, saving DoCoMo and other 3G `wannabe' firms a lot of money, it has doled out the 3G licenses for free.
