The Japan Connection : ="Europeans disappointed with clunky wireless Internet services are about to get an infusion of smart Tokyo-style technology. Will it make a difference?(Brief Article)

Europeans wondering what to do with their agonizingly slow wireless Internet phones might want to check out what's going on in Japan. The country is hooked--chiefly to NTT DoCoMo's i-mode service. Already almost 20 million Japanese use i-mode wireless phones to play games, send photos to their friends and get instant maps to the nearest karaoke bar. They have tens of thousands of services to choose from, and they never have to dial up: i-mode is always on. They're always connected.

For Japanese consumers, i-mode is now the most popular way to connect to the Internet, including Web televisions and PC dial-up services, and 55,000 people are still signing up each day. I-mode handsets are almost as hot as Sony's PlayStation 2. In Tokyo's Shibuya district you'll find hundreds of bright, cheery i-mode handsets with big color displays. Each device has built-in software for fancy screen animations and quick and easy downloading of music clips. Some have games and even tiny video cameras. Next to them, Nokia's WAP phones look downright ancient.

When DoCoMo announced last month that it planned to bring i-mode to Europe, many folks interpreted it as a sign that the Continent would finally get a happening wireless service. I-mode technology is clearly superior to present-generation WAP. DoCoMo's mobile network in Japan uses so-called packet switching, in which digital data is sent in discrete chunks. This allows DoCoMo to offer a service in which users are essentially online 24 hours a day but pay only for each packet of data they send or receive. Europe's GSM networks, by contrast, require a dedicated-line connection each time a user want access to a service. That's why WAP phones can take half a minute or so just to connect to a Web page, and it's partly why they're so expensive.

Europeans, meanwhile, are outdoing themselves to go DoCoMo one better. Spain's Telefonica Moviles and Germany's Deutsche Telekom are just now rolling out new, faster networks called GPRS that use packet-switching technology. (In the United States, DoCoMo and AT&T Wireless are planning an i-mode-type service sometime next year.) By the time DoCoMo and its European partners--E-Plus in Germany, Telecom Italia, and KPN in the Netherlands and Belgium--bring out their service at the end of this year, Europe will be getting a healthy injection of competitive wireless technology.

If all these sizzling new mobile networks get built, will Europeans finally reap the benefits of wireless services they anticipated a year and a half ago, when WAP was introduced? It's an open question. Technology, it turns out, is only the half of it. Europe's phone companies are going to have to get a whole lot better at appealing to the masses.

I-mode's dizzying variety of entertainment and simple, useful ...