Japanese mobile carrier NTT DoCoMo is being flooded with complaints about retail outlets selling out of its superfast cell phones that went on sale this week, the company's president said Wednesday.

The reason some outlets are selling out is that only a limited number of the videophone model is available.

The videophone is the most popular feature of 3G because callers can see each other's faces on the phone displays.

In their first day in stores Monday, 4,000 3G handsets were sold - about 1,600 videophones, another 1,600 of the i-mode upgrade and about 800 cards, DoCoMo said. Stores are running short especially on the videophones. Most of the first shipments were i-mode upgrades.

"It is great news many stores sold out, but we also apologize," NTT DoCoMo President Keiji Tachikawa told reporters.

Orders are now out to handset manufacturers, he said. DoCoMo officials would not say how many would be available or when that would be.

The 3G service is initially limited to the Tokyo area, and DoCoMo intends a slow rollout because of possible glitches. Major features such as the relay of video clips and music downloads aren't available until next spring.

The company is targeting 150,000 3G users by March. I-mode has attracted 27 million Japanese since 1999. DoCoMo is not counting on making a profit from 3G for the first four years.

"3G is largely progressing according to plan," Tachikawa said.

FOMA is an upgrade. A little better. The beginning of something bigger.

Hopes for streaming video are slim, but a interactive i-appli where you battle each other with martial arts moves (Street Fighter) may be possible. Or a mini-Doom like application. Or any slow appli or i-mode site now would be fast with FOMA.

Or a number of not yet disclosed projects we are working on now would also benefit greatly from FOMA.

Smaller lighter faster programs. Yipee.

Any comments...?

We'll be the first to admit that the company is often an easy target, and we've taken our share of direct, though not unjustified, shots at Big D. Has the company made mistakes? Sure thing. Has it used its former monopoly status to wield undue influence and dominate the market? Yup. Does it continue to tell technology, content, and service providers of all stripes what to do, and how to do it? Yesiree. Nonetheless, today's achievement deserves a hearty pat on the back.

Mind you, we don't want to get too gushy -- there's still a lot of work ahead, and for now, the 3G Foma network remains more of a technology showcase than a solid, revenue-producing, done deal. To start, the network's service area will be limited to some 30 km around Tokyo. It won't be until later next year that the rest of the country, starting with major urban areas, gets connected.

Further there's little you can do on the 3G Foma network that you can't do better (if, admittedly, slower) on the existing 2.5G PDC network. All existing content and services on i-mode, for example, have been optimized for the current glacial 9.6-Kbps packet-switched service. Yes, you can video conference on the Foma phones, but unless all your friends are early adopters too, you won't have anyone to videoconference with.

Speaking of handset capabilities, the new Panasonic and NEC 3G models are beauts. The Panasonic P2101 model is blue and gold, and has a video camera for conferencing, photos, and video clip creation. The trial model that we tried had about 1.5 MB of onboard memory, and could store about 1:14 min:secs of video at superfine resolution (or 30 photos), 1:35 min:secs of video at fine resolution (or 51 photos), or 2:08 min:secs of video at normal resolution (or 76 photos).

The handsets, sadly, are still expensive. The Panasonic models cost JPY69,800 and JPY29,800, the NEC one will run you JPY49,800, and the PC data card retails for about JPY17,100 (reported this evening by Manish Prabhune after a visit to one DoCoMo shop in Akasaka).

The phones operate in two modes: packet-switched at up to 384 Kbps and circuit-switched at 64 Kbps. The circuit-switched mode is used for transmitting/receiving large volumes of data (e.g. photos, video calls) at a lower time based cost, while the packet-switched mode is used for packet data (mail, etc.) and costs more.

J@pan Inc Magazine
http://www.japaninc.net/

Lets start with a 5k i-appli on a P503i phone. Its 50% of the maximum size. (10k).

I hope (not sure) that the FOMA phones may have a larger max jar size for i-appli. Lets say 30k. The same 5k i-appli is now 17% of the max size and "smaller" from the relative standpoint of the phone.

Same might go for sound and image files, or it might not.

Next the faster part. Hopefully the processors on the new FOMA phones will run faster, so the same programs will run faster. So if you compare a FOMA and a non-FOMA phone, the FOMA should display the same content faster because it was made more recently and hopefully has a newer faster processor.

And by lighter, I don't mean weight, I was thinking of load. Hopefully 3G can handle more load so the same amount of data sent now by i-mode will be lighter in a figurative sense. It will be lighter on the lines and the phone because both are hopefully capable of more.

(I was thinking about deleting my line smaller faster lighter but decided not too, bad choice on my part.)

But yes I do agree with you. In actuality people will probably write even bigger, programs for FOMA thus destroying any benefits that would be achieved by writing the same stuff thats being written now.

Watch as other carriers around the world delay until the latest standards for w-CDMA are completed and the "bugs" removed from the operating test system in Japan.

Following its introduction in Tokyo, FOMA will launch in Kyoto, Osaka, Kobe and Nagoya by December, DoCoMo said. By next spring, service will expand to serve most major markets in Japan. The company said it expects to sign up 150,000 3G customers by March 2002 -- and 6 million by 2004.

Next-generation wireless services will be rolled out in increments, the company said, with the i-motion video-clip feature to begin this year. M-stage video and M-stage music distribution services will be rolled out in spring 2002, DoCoMo said.

Five basic monthly service plans are offered, with costs ranging from 3,900 yen to 15,000 yen (US$32.77 to $126.06). DoCoMo said it expects to turn a profit with FOMA within four years of launch

Here is my idea about:

Handsets
Great idea of what the future will be. I see them quiet bulky and in my tests battery was very weak (Close to one hour of intense data-based use...). Screen is really the best thing you have and is the thing that make sense having 3g speed and bigger downloads. Videophone is funky but not a lot for business... japanese-street-warriors-girls will love this indeed. So DoCoMo... on the coming models please include 3d graphics and Multimedia Card or Secure Digital card hot-swappable (I would like to play while in the underground and carry photos, videos, e-mails and nice tunes with me...)

Market
DoCoMo is very conservative on numbers and I expect Foma getting hot by next summer. Hoping on attractive 2g Foma handsets that should be in place for that time with more power-savvy chipsets and little better prices and yes...the coverage... Right now I see just a very limited number of early adopters buying them and this is not helpfull to have an idea of things to come... I do not expect segmentation changing a lot from actual i-mode. Is difficult to imagine corporate Samurais jumping on Foma to be more business effective (No applications yet...) or to see the face of their boss while commuting (Will you?). For sure fast e-mail downloads and web browsing will be interesting so, I see many Foma-connected laptops and pdas in the future.

Consumer use will be the very part of the use... DoCoMo should develop better game-capabilities on Foma (This is really deep in Japanese culture). Games with 3d graphics, MP3 playing, video streaming and cameras will be very tasty for the i-mode consumer user base. This is not yet the case of the first two models. Service prices right now make no sense for the average (M-Stage services too...) ... I do not expect a drop in fashion sales in favour of Foma bills. But @DoCoMo they know this and their ARPU vision is something that can tell us what they are thinking (That is quiet different from VodaFone).

So... really promising but green.

Giovanni (gyo@well.com)

We've heard that real throughput in packet mode is around 220-230 Kbps; but this should quickly improve. The handsets also have a UIM card (a newer, local version of the SIM card well-known in the GSM world). If you transfer your UIM card to another handset, your phone number and other personal data goes with it. Cool!

The video conferencing, by the way, **really** does work. The images are clear, the sound is good, and there are few dropped frames or pauses. The camera rotates, so that if, say, your friend is looking for you in downtown Tokyo, and you are trying to tell him which way to go to meet you at a particular sushi shop you happen to be standing in front of, have your friend hold up the phone with the camera rotated outward, and tell him which way to head based on what you're seeing. ("OK, now cross the street over by that Lawson's on the left, and keep walking. Watch out for the little old lady with the shopping buggy.")

Sure, this example is perhaps a little goofy, but there is no reason why new 3G subscribers won't find similarly mundane but just as useful applications for their phones.

But there is still that problem of lack of content & services that take advantage of the 3G network speeds, and lack of service area. Of these, the lack of content and services is the more serious. We're certain DoCoMo must be worried that, for many potential 3G subscribers, existing 2.5G services will continue to be good enough. DoCoMo (and any other carrier that deploys a 3G network) is unavoidably faced with the "HDTV problem."

After years of development work on HDTV (high-definition TV), the final product -- though technically sophisticated and undeniably better than existing color TV -- was stillborn because current color TV image quality is "good enough," and no one wants to pay $5,000-plus for a new HDTV receiver for a mere incremental boost in the viewing experience.

In other words, DoCoMo -- and 3G -- still needs a killer app; some service that can only be provided because of the faster data speeds that 3G offers. We haven't a clue what that app could be (nor does DoCoMo, we would surmise), although video conferencing (once enough users have switched to the new network), music video download, and database-intensive enterprise applications all suggest themselves.

But we're certain of one thing, and that's that Big D is likely to figure out what is the 3G killer app before anyone else does -- before J-Phone, before KDDI, and (Perhaps most importantly?) before Vodafone. And when it does, the money will come pouring in, just like it does on the 31-month-old i-mode system, proving all the nay-sayers again utterly wrong.

Is the Japanese wireless consumer attitude so different from the European one?

Is MMS the first killer app to be expected from 3g including foma in the future?

What you think?

3G in Japan is just the beginning for docomo. they have recently released a very fascinating video called "vision 2010" about the future of mobile communications. Very incredible. I suggest you visit at http://www.nttdocomo.com/company/vision2010/home.html. It's really fascinating, they show Holographic computers and cell phones that display holographic images. Have fun.
--Me--