This article explains what the fuss is all about. Until now, DoCoMo's advertising focused more on entertainment than on business applications. As is the case for the wired Web based mostly on PCs, the i-Mode killer app is email, comprising nearly half of the total traffic. From the marketing point of view, i-Mode is incredibly popular. It went from zero to eleven million subscribers in about a year and a half.
Mobile phones are less expensive than land phones, especially considering installation costs.
Surprisingly, there are also more WAP users in Japan than anywhere else. In fact, the Japanese wireless Internet market is the biggest in the world. According to Eurotechnology, the approximate market share for wireless Internet is represented in this graph. Recently, DoCoMo entered into partnership with Sun to port Java. But in 2001, NTT DoCoMo will improve its infrastructure by moving to third generation wireless, with a data transfer rate of 384 kbps for download and 64kbps for upload.