Smart to offer I-Mode

Smart Telecoms has announced that it will be offering I-Mode service to its customers.

This isn't really a new news to me thats why I never bothered to blog about it until today. NTT-Docomo has an office at the Smart Bldg and it has been there for a long time. It seemed Smart has prevented NTT-Docomo to roll-out I-mode until it fully saturated its GSM network.

The funny thing about this is; in Japan, telecoms has started to roll-out GSM/CDMA. Technically I-Mode technology is not superior to GSM, it has its own cravats and more. The protocol itself has been a subject of nightmarish integration problems because I-Mode is a proprietary protocol.

Finally, I haven't brushed-up on reading on the new capabilities of I-Mode but historically only I-Mode supported sites can be viewed through it thus saying good-bye to those websites that you can normally view via mobile browsers (eg: m.gmail.com or m.facebook.com).

However there is a work around using OperaMini to view websites in its full glory.

You can read a summary of what really I-Mode is at NTRG; there might be newer capabilities with the new I-Mode (3G-I-Mode) for fix the old problems but since it still uses the PDC-P packet switching, I'm not going to hold my hopes up.