This week has marked the 18th birthday of the mobile Internet. It was on February 22 1999 that Japanese telco NTT Docomo announced the start of the world’s first successful mobile Internet service to a small number of people who made it to a press conference in Tokyo, notes Eurotechnology Japan.
Telstra brought the service, then dubbed i-Mode, to Australia in 2004, offering lifestyle content via special i-Mode supporting phones and promising to have 200 content sites available across 13 categories within a year.
However 2004 was also the year that Telstra launched its 3G service, which was dubbed Next-G – and three years later Telstra killed off i-Mode, citing the much bigger range of multimedia features available on Next-G. – Stuart Corner
