Our take...
i-mode was initially launched in Japan with NTT DoCoMo in 1999 and it proved extremely popular. As a result of its success in Japan, the service was licensed to operators in Spain, Italy, France, Greece and KPN in Germany and Benelux. It was offered as an alternative to the slow WAP-based services available at the time. At one stage, the service had 60m subscribers in Japan and over 5m in the rest of the world. However, the service never proved as popular in Europe as it had done in Japan and the introduction of flat-rate 3G services giving unlimited access to the internet meant that the service became outdated. In July 2007, O2 ended its i-mode service only 2 years after taking it on, citing poor subscriber numbers. The same month saw KPN announce that it would no longer be launching new i-mode services for the same reason. Screen Digest predicts closure other European i-mode deployments will follow.