i-mode finally connects with the UK
Published: 30 Sep 2005 11:40 BST
Précis: i-mode will be available to prepay and contract customers on both 2G and 3G devices. From early October, O2 will offer four handsets in the UK from NEC and Samsung, and a further Siemens handset in Ireland. These will be offered free of charge on a contract and cost from £80-280 on prepay.
Customers who wish to browse on a 'pay as a you use' model — which is open to prepay and contract customers — will pay £3 per MB. Customers who purchase bundles of data browsing up front in a subscription will get better value for money, at £3 per month for 2MB and £5 per month for 4MB. Again these are open to both prepay and contract customers. The bundles only lock customers in for one calendar month and they can unsubscribe at any time.
At launch, O2 has announced 80 content partners, rising to 100 by the end of the year. Every content provider will provide some element of 'free ' content — customers will only pay for the browsing and not pay an additional charge to the content provider — which is expected to be around 30 percent of each site. Customers who wish to access premium content will then sign up for additional subscriptions with the content providers — expected to range from £1-£3 per month. There is no event-based pricing, all charges are on a monthly subscription basis — other than the messaging i-mail service.
Comment: O2 has been talking about i-mode for a long time and it's good to see that it is now bringing the service to market. We think that the handset range at launch is probably too small — but we are assured further handsets are to come.
"The data pricing will be a new concept for most UK consumers, with most people having no idea of what a MB is. This will be one of the key challenges for O2 to communicate to the users. It has tried to install some simplicity in the pricing by...
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