While I blog a lot about wireless stuff, I have actually never written about which mobile phone I own and what I think about it.

My phone is NEC 22i, which is an i-mode phone. The i-mode services were created by NTT DoCoMo and have encountered a big success in Japan. DoCoMo has been licensing the technology to other operators in the world and the third French operator Bouygues Telecom launched it in 2002. In US AT&T Wireless is also selling it under the name m-mode.

I bought this phone two years ago when I came back to France. I didn’t specially wanted i-mode services, but the calling plan was good. The phone was also good looking, which wasn’t that common in 2002. The design of mobile phones has improved a lot in the last year (thanks Sony-Ericsson and Samsung). The NEC 22i is far from perfect. It’s a bit big, the menus are confusing, and battery life is average… Of course it’s not up to today’s standard anymore (no camera, no Bluetooth…).

i-mode is composed of several services. One can access i-mode sites, which are light web pages written in cHTML, a flavor of HTML. It is also possible to send and receive e-mail. The usual ring-tones downloading is also present, and newer i-mode phones support Java games (again, not standard Java but “i-mode Java”) and video.

While i-mode works well technically (pages load quickly, etc.) I don’t find it very useful for a couple of reasons. First I’m a lot on the Internet, and I almost never need web or email access when I’m far from a computer. Or when I do, I’m in another country, where of course i-mode doesn’t work. Second, the pricing of the service is bad. It’s 1 cents per kbyte, which is ok, but in addition to this most of the useful sites like AlloCiné for movies schedules have a subscription of 1 to 3 Euros per month. If once in a while I need when a movie starts, I don’t want to start paying a subscription for a use limited to a few times per year.

Now that the two other French operators, Orange (owned by France Telecom) and SFR (partially owned by Vodaphone) have launched their 3G network, it will be interesting to see how Bouygues Telecom follows. They were actually pretty smart by not bidding for a 3G license during the 2001 bidding when the prices were so high, but buying one later much cheaper.

Great thing is that in about a month, I will get a new phone with my new job. I don’t know what it will be, but if I could choose I would gladly accept the Nokia 6630: Series 60, WCDMA and EDGE, 1.3 megapixel camera, MMC card support, video recording, Bluetooth, USB 2.0, etc. I hope my future boss is reading my blog…

This entry was posted on Friday, January 28th, 2005 at 7:00 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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