The first Internet service for mobile phones. Introduced in Japan in 1999 by NTT DoCoMo, there were more than 10 million subscribers within two years. By 2008, there were more than 50 million with the vast majority in Japan.
i-mode provides e-mail, calendar, chat, games, news, as well as Web browsing to i-mode enabled Web sites. "Official" sites partner with DoCoMo and are found in the i-mode menu; however, there are tens of thousands of "unofficial" sites. i-mode is a proprietary system that uses a subset of HTML, known as Compact HTML (cHTML).
From 2G to 3G Speeds
i-mode was introduced when phones were still in the 2G development stage, and download speeds were as low as 9.6 Kbps. Speeds rose to 384 Kbps with 3G FOMA and 3.6 Mbps with FOMA High Speed. See FOMA, NTT DoCoMo and cellular generations.
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