I-Mode

ross_castle

Does anyone know what I Mode is or what it does. I keep seeong it metioned here and ther. In a classic Bad Wolf scenario

MiCr0

i-mode is something similar to wap, but its got more content types and features
its nothing very exciting
i think google might have a few pages on it if you search

jesus_thats_gre

I-Mode in Japan is technically very different to what is being offered here..

I-Mode in Japan is based on its own tech while here, it is just layered over the existing WAP services, i.e. it is WAP with a different appearence..

Vodafone Live or O2 Active works on a similar premise, but I-Mode is Japan overs alot of material created by end users..

ross_castle

Has anyone used it, Know if its anygood or costs

ross_castle

Technically differant in which way

abc123

Jesus that's Great, you are wrong about the imode implementation. The imode implementation in Europe is the same as that in Japan.

Content is designed to work on cHTML (mark up language used in Japan & Europe), which is different to that of WML (used in WAP in Europe).

Content can be designed to work by end users creating their own sites (as they do in Japan and as people do in Europe creating their own sites in cHTML (imode) & WML (WAP)), as well as large content providers.

Costs to subscribe to services should be cheaper than many third party services available from providers not affiliated with mobile networks.

jesus_thats_gre

Yes but still runs over the existing WAP infrastructure and effectlively offers a very similar user experience to say Active of Live..

When I-Mode and WAP 1.x were released, I-Mode was vastly superior to WAP. This is not the case anymore now that WAP 2.0 is about..

I can't really understand why some European operators are launching I-Mode branded services to be honest.. Its obviously trying to take of advantage of the market hype that surrounds I-Mode..

abc123

It uses GPRS & 3G bearer networks but the core platform is different. It is completely seperate to any existing WAP Platforms.

The differences in performance are based on cHTML content development & how this is profiled on the handset. Developed & implemented by content providers in the right way imode provides a better performance than that of WAP 2.0 based on speed and reliability, which provides a better user experience.

The reasons for choosing to implement imode are a mixture of technical performance & commercial business model i.e. model between the operator & content provider.

jesus_thats_gre

Oh right, I was told different but you seem pretty confident about it. So are you saying that the existing WAP infrastucture is pulled out and replaced or is it just by passed? MMS utilises the WAP gateway so I assume its left in place and another device in installed for I-Mode.

abc123

imode & WAP will run and operate as two independant services from each other on seperate infrastructure. It is quite a good user experience, when you get to try it let us know...

aikon

With all this talk of i-mode, I'm surprised no one mentioned i-mail. Push email direct to the phone. And none of this MMS walled garden stuff. Anyone can email to an i-mail user.

A

MiCr0

mms email can go to any user
i use it all the time

abc123

imail is very good. Again this is implemented in Europe in the same way as Japan.

The user experience for receiving an imail is the same as a BlackBerry. E-mails are automatically received onto the imode handset with no user initiation, dial up or manual request.

You are given a new imail address to use the service, will not

imode devices come pre-configured to do this, which will save alot of messy around for non techies and is a very good user experience.

aikon

But MiCr0, the thing is that you're email users can't send to your MMS. i-mail can.

The Corinthian

bedlam wrote:

imode is NTT DoCoMo's (Japan) mobile internet access system, it is similar to 3g. O2 in Ireland are currently trialing it.

Don’t be silly, they’re not related - that’s like claiming that Java is an alternative to Bluetooth.

iMode is essentially a parallel technology to WAP. Technologically there’s not a lot between them, both use a gateway-proxy architecture, both use a propriety mark-up language (WML and cHTML respectively) and both have limited multimedia and push capabilities.

iMode was the creation of Japanese operator NTT DoCoMo, while WAP was the collaborative effort of numerous operators, handset manufacturers and associated firms under the umbrella of the Open Mobile Alliance (formerly the WAP Forum). It should be noted that iMode was probably more media rich than WAP when the latter first came out, but this is certainly not the case.

What mainly differentiates them is the business model behind them. iMode concentrated on promoting subscription based services and sharing revenue with the content provider (AFAIR around 93% went to the content provider). WAP was largely promoted by European operators who originally chose to buy content outright when first launched.

This meant is that the content on iMode tended to be more popular than on WAP as the latter was given no incentive to be in demand - as long as the content provider could flog their wares to an operator, they didn’t care if no one looked at it. On the other hand, if users failed to subscribe to a content provider’s wears on iMode, then the content provider would not make any money.

O2 are indeed launching a WAP service, although I don’t know when. I even got to see one of the new handsets they’d be bringing out a few weeks ago.

davidconf

Hi everyone! I have an imode phone in Italy, with Wind network. I think imode is similar to GPRS, if it was wap you would have to make a sort of phone call and with imode you don't do it! Using imode you can visit special sistes (news, music, sport, trading on line, weather forecast...) and sending or receiving emails with your personal address. when you receive an email the phone rings like when you receive a text message...
Sending an email to any address is free (maybe now costs 2 cents) and also receiving is free. To enter the sites you pay a monthly fee (1 or 2 euro), but there are often some offers.
In Italy is not very popular, but I think it's useful if you need emails for work?

And how is the situation in Ireland?

The Corinthian

davidconf wrote:

I think imode is similar to GPRS, if it was wap you would have to make a sort of phone call and with imode you don't do it!

iMode is not "similar to GPRS". GPRS, like GSM, EDGE or UTMS (3G) is a transport mechanism, nothing more. I can connect to WAP, for example, either over GPRS or over the GSM network, if I so choose.

Where iMode is related to GPRS is that it specifically takes advantage of both the greater bandwidth afforded by it as well as it’s always on property. MMS does the same, and MMS is part of WAP.

As for what iMode actually is, I’ve already explained it in my previous post - the one immediately preceding yours that you didn’t bother reading before sharing your theories with us.

And how is the situation in Ireland?

You’ll find that this is what has been discussed throughout this thread.

davidconf

Sorry, sorry, sorry... Probably I'm not an expert, maybe I have written what I wanted to write in a not very good way... I'm not a mother-tongue English speaker, so I could have done some mistakes...
I have a phone with GPRS and not Imode: they both work on GPRS, but the graphics and the services are very different. I stop talking about this technic features...
But let me say a thing, please. I was only expressing an opinion, I was only trying to be kind and tell you how imode works in Italy where I live, I think I would have given you an information, maybe an useful information.

As for what iMode actually is, I’ve already explained it in my previous post - the one immediately preceding yours that you didn’t bother reading before sharing your theories with us.

It seems that you have to pay money for anything you write here.... What have I done??? I just wanted to be kind and to tell you about my experience in Italy.... Sincerely, I don't care about Imode is in Ireland, my life would be the same...

I think this is a place where everyone should express his own opinion, but someone makes it impossible... I try to be kind with you, but unfortunetely my efforts are not appreciated.

Bye.
Davide

The Corinthian

davidconf wrote:

Sorry, sorry, sorry... Probably I'm not an expert, maybe I have written what I wanted to write in a not very good way... I'm not a mother-tongue English speaker, so I could have done some mistakes...

Your English seems quite competent and you're not the only person here whose mother-tongue is not English, myself included.

But let me say a thing, please. I was only expressing an opinion, I was only trying to be kind and tell you how imode works in Italy where I live, I think I would have given you an information, maybe an useful information.

No one is chastising you for expressing an opinion, only for not reading what had already been discussed. Essentially you are saying that you couldn't be bothered to follow the discussion but want to say something anyway - so you can't blame people for pointing this out to you (especially when it was mentioned in the post immediately preceding yours.

It seems that you have to pay money for anything you write here.... What have I done??? I just wanted to be kind and to tell you about my experience in Italy.... Sincerely, I don't care about Imode is in Ireland, my life would be the same...

I never questioned your experience of iMode in Italy, only that you hadn't bothered to follow the thread (and it's not like it was twenty pages long). By all means contribute, but do look before you leap.

I think this is a place where everyone should express his own opinion, but someone makes it impossible... I try to be kind with you, but unfortunetely my efforts are not appreciated.

Scendi dalla croce chicco, qualcuno ha bisogno del legno

Seriously though, your contributions are welcome, so long as they contribute.

ross_castle

Came acrss this today.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/09/26/o2_i-mode_launch/

So this day next week it is then

davidconf

I think this "argument" between me and The Corinthian can be closed. I've understood, and it's true, I didn't pay much attention reading posts before mine. I read "imode" as title of the thread and I've only thought about my experience.
Yesterday I wrote about GPRS (I was wrong) because I had read in some previous posts that there was a discussion about wap and gprs related to imode...

I think now it's alright! Thank you Corinthian for the rules!
Bye!

ross_castle

lOOKS lIKE IT LAUNCHES Saturday

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/09/26/o2_i-mode_launch/

jesus_thats_gre

So is it fair to assume that they are launching I-Mode because Active was a failure (I assume it failed because I have never seen anyone even use it).

ross_castle

I use active that's why iam so itrested in I Mode. I use t for games, results, cinema and tv listings. I think it's a excellent service. It also only costs me 1c per Kb. I think you just have a chip on your shoulder about o2. have noticed a very definite bias in your posts towards VF. Do you work for Vf

Blaster99

abc123 wrote:

The differences in performance are based on cHTML content development & how this is profiled on the handset. Developed & implemented by content providers in the right way imode provides a better performance than that of WAP 2.0 based on speed and reliability, which provides a better user experience.

The reasons for choosing to implement imode are a mixture of technical performance & commercial business model i.e. model between the operator & content provider.

You sound like somebody who has read the marketing material. cHtml is inferior to XHTML as implemented by WAP 2.0 phones. The phones have generally a pathetically small page size as well. i-mode is certainly not faster and why would it be? I tend to find that i-mode phones are in fact slower than let's say Nokia's XHTML phones. Probably due to poor browser performance or slow CPU's in the phones.

As for the i-mode platform itself, it's a dog.

The only thing i-mode has going for it is the business model, but that could have been applied to the more modern XHTML phones and O2 could have saved itself a lot of money and bother. The business model is good but we'll see if people are interested in paying monthly subscriptions for content on top of usage charges.

abc123

imode sites are developed to work with specific device types. The page sizes developed for these devices depend on the functionality of the device i.e. Step 1, 2 or 3. Based on the device the site is optimised to work within these ranges.

Depending on the site, this will govern the speed at which an xHTML or cHTML device can display the page. I have performed a number of tests against the same site formatted based on with xHTML & cHTML and have found the imode (cHTML) site to be faster.

Again this is subjective testing and cannot account for slow back end content servers, GPRS / 3G network performance but this noticeable difference is what the "customer experience" will ultimately be based on.

What imode phones have you used where you have found the experience to be slower?

You are right on the business model, of course this could be applied to existing WAP services.

Subscription based charging in the mobile world for content services is already with us and many of the content providers providing games, ringtones, wall papers etc are or have already moved to subscription based billing in addition to event based billing.

As for the imode platform being a dog? What do you mean by this? You need to be more specific, from what I have seen it is a proven platform, which is easy to implement. Do you have any direct experience of what you speak of?

The Corinthian

abc123 wrote:

imode sites are developed to work with specific device types. The page sizes developed for these devices depend on the functionality of the device i.e. Step 1, 2 or 3. Based on the device the site is optimised to work within these ranges.

Interesting approach.

Again this is subjective testing and cannot account for slow back end content servers, GPRS / 3G network performance but this noticeable difference is what the "customer experience" will ultimately be based on.

Don't forget that one of the biggest bottlenecks is the gateway and both WAP and iMode use a gateway to byte-compress content. It's quite possible the problem was the WAP gateway - this has long been the Achilles heel of WAP.

As for the imode platform being a dog?

I think when most people accuse iMode of being a 'dog' they base it upon it's closed, proprietary nature and that it's developed in cHTML, which is a an application of SGML (actually it's basically HTML 1, with some HTML 2 tags). WAP on the other hand is more open, extensible and can be developed in WML or xHTML, that are both applications of XML.

Indeed, the latter was generally seen as a move forward by most and meant that Openwave (then Phone.com) would phase out it's SGML-based HDML platform in favour of it. And from a development and technical perspective is is difficult to argue that an SGML-based platform is ultimately superior to an XML-based one.

Of course, whether this makes it a 'dog' alone, is another matter.

jesus_thats_gre

XML is derived from SGML no?

The Corinthian

jesus_thats_gre wrote:

XML is derived from SGML no?

'Derived' is not the same as 'an application of'.

XML is (derived from) a subset of SGML. As such, interoperability between applications of XML is a lot easier than between applications of SGML. It is largely this ease that has resulted in XML becoming the standard across the Web, with even HTML moving from being an application of SGML to one of XML.

otron

The Corinthian wrote:

Don't forget that one of the biggest bottlenecks is the gateway and both WAP and iMode use a gateway to byte-compress content. It's quite possible the problem was the WAP gateway - this has long been the Achilles heel of WAP.

In practice, most WML WAP sites are pre-encoded by the content provider so there isnt a hit on the wap gateway.

Also byte encoding went out with WML and the WAP protocol stack. So a WAP2 handset downloading xHTML over w-tcp/w-http doesn't have any byte encoding.

The i-mode gateway doesnt need to byte encode either .. byte encoding is only possible with WML based pages.

The Corinthian

otron wrote:

Also byte encoding went out with WML and the WAP protocol stack. So a WAP2 handset downloading xHTML over w-tcp/w-http doesn't have any byte encoding.

You would think so given the greater bandwidth afforded by GPRS and 3G, but apparently not.

The i-mode gateway doesnt need to byte encode either .. byte encoding is only possible with WML based pages.

Last time I read a tech spec from NTT DoCoMo, it did.

otron

The Corinthian wrote:

You would think so given the greater bandwidth afforded by GPRS and 3G, but apparently not.

Im not sure what part of the spec you are referring to, the doc is 24 pages long.
Maybe you are referring to the w-http support for (gzip AFAIR) content compression? This is indeed done by the gateway but is different to byte-encoding.. in the WAP1 sense anyway. If that's a pedantic point, fair enough.

The Corinthian wrote:

Last time I read a tech spec from NTT DoCoMo, it did.

What exactly are you referring to? CHTML being byte encoded? Can you refer/lnk to this DoCoMo spec?

The Corinthian

otron wrote:

Maybe you are referring to the w-http support for (gzip AFAIR) content compression? This is indeed done by the gateway but is different to byte-encoding.. in the WAP1 sense anyway. If that's a pedantic point, fair enough.

Of course I was referring to content compression - what other type of byte encoding do you think we were discussing?

What exactly are you referring to? CHTML being byte encoded? Can you refer/lnk to this DoCoMo spec?

Sorry, can’t. It was an offline document.

otron

The Corinthian wrote:

Of course I was referring to content compression - what other type of byte encoding do you think we were discussing?

Well, when using the term "byte encoding" in the context of WAP, I tend to think of the encoding used in the headers of the WSP layer (Appendix A&B of the WSP Spec). Also, I believe that it is possible to further encode the actual WML page, replacing WML tags with byte values.

To me, this is byte encoding, and HTTP content compression is HTTP content compression. Again, if you see that as pedantic then fair enough.

The Corinthian wrote:

Sorry, can’t. It was an offline document.

I guess you mean (what I would call) content compression here also? Given that i-mode uses w-HTTP then that makes sense.

northowl

w-HTTP is just basic regular HTTP. Any wap2 recommendations are minor, mostly optional, standard RFC's. Most of them anyway are implemented on fixed line infra as they help there too.

WAP2 "gateways" are nothing more than HTTP proxies with fancy names.

WAP2 is Web1. There is no difference here lads, so ye are just splitting hairs talking about 'byte compression' and other red herrings.

The Corinthian

otron wrote:

Well, when using the term "byte encoding" in the context of WAP, I tend to think of the encoding used in the headers of the WSP layer (Appendix A&B of the WSP Spec). Also, I believe that it is possible to further encode the actual WML page, replacing WML tags with byte values.

To me, this is byte encoding, and HTTP content compression is HTTP content compression. Again, if you see that as pedantic then fair enough.

The byte encoding of WML content, using WBXML, is for the compression of WML content in a binary format. It's not all that pedantic.

northowl wrote:

WAP2 "gateways" are nothing more than HTTP proxies with fancy names.

And very high price tags. Funny how half the OMA produces them.

Slice

O2 are said to be launching i-Mode enabled handsets tomorrow with the biggest marketing spend since they rebranded from Digifone

otron

Hmmm .. Northowl - just signed up to join in this thread eh?

northowl wrote:

w-HTTP is just basic regular HTTP. Any wap2 recommendations are minor, mostly optional, standard RFC's. Most of them anyway are implemented on fixed line infra as they help there too.

Indeed. Any protocol related benefits of having a WAP2 proxy between the handset and the internet/content sites would mainly come from w-TCP rather then w-HTTP.

The implementation of the large inital window size, and the fact that the window doesn?t shrink back to 1 x MSS when a packet is lost (etc) would help download rates quite a bit more then any of the minor modifications in w-HTTP.

You are, of course, correct that these TCP features (as that?s all they are) could be implemented by a web server but that would be hit and miss, and far from universally supported.

For the record I?m not entirely convinced as to the level of improvement from using w-TCP and w-HTTP either.

northowl wrote:

WAP2 "gateways" are nothing more than HTTP proxies with fancy names.

There is definitely less of a place for a gateway in WAP2 alright. It's obvious that it would be possible to browse WAP sites without using one, over the operator?s internet APN. The only problems (apart from a possiblethroughput degradation) would be when it came to sites that normally receive the users phone number from the WAP-GW. The biggest example of this would be the operators MMSC.

How much that bothers someone is a matter for them to decide

MiCr0

The Corinthian wrote:

And very high price tags. Funny how half the OMA produces them.

We've got to sell something

wap proxys also handle charging&stats/access control/binary encoding/data push/the list goes on

The Corinthian

MiCr0 wrote:

wap proxys also handle charging&stats/access control/binary encoding/data push/the list goes on

Shussh! Otron will accuse you of pedantry

otron

The Corinthian wrote:

Shussh! Otron will accuse you of pedantry

Ah now here!

I was actually saying that if you thought what I was saying was pedantic then thats cool - didn't want to be seen to be pedantic myself!

Anyway, what was said about the other functions of the WAP-GW are true indeed. If they are of use to the operator then the role of the WAP-GW indeed becomes more important.

MiCr0

i work in wap gateways - and they are very big business
large system's can have 1500+ transactions per second on them
which is a lot of wap

they are also used for mms and video streaming to terminals
they also are used for information sharing between operators and website owners - for charging etc