Via Keitai-L, Vodafone to begin fixed-rate service for sweethearts: "Vodafone KK said Tuesday it will begin a service on Nov 1 that will allow a subscriber to converse and exchange email with a designated person limitlessly for a fixed monthly fee of 315 yen."

This sounds interesting: "we are going to be providing a known issues database where we will track known bugs and issues of the various phones; mostly Java and BREW to start. "

I'll confess slight scepticism as to how Mobile Research will compete with WURFL and its offshoots, but the idea of a public bug database for handsets is a very compelling one (I think Richard may have proposed it a while back)... all too often we're having to scratch around to determine whether bizarre behaviour is a handset issue, and having some sort of source to check this (and maybe locate workarounds?) would be very helpful.

Yahoo launch its own billing solution: "It means they can now provide full access, content and billing to end users independently from carriers."

I've heard of other alternative billing systems to those provided by DoCoMo, which let unofficial content get charged out. Has anyone actually seen them in action?

The end of WYSIWYG?: "There is also live-previewing which allows people to easily try permutations and options without having to commit changes"

This sounds interesting; lots of apps already do it, of course, but it seems that with processing power on the desktop having improved massively over the last 10 years, it's ripe to be rolled into the UI as a general principle... in many ways GUIs were the same, there were people doing WIMP interfaces with character-based displays back in the day, well before Windows/GEM/etc did it.

So, after being given the run-through last week (and oohing and aahing at the NEC N343i, "the gayest phone we've ever seen") I popped into town and picked up a handset today. I'll record my impressions here and update the post over time.

Took handset out of box, plugged in battery and charger. The SIM was already in there. Turned it on, pressed the "I-mode" button. It just worked - I've not had to activate my SIM or anything yet, and I can browse the I-mode portal. That's very nice.

I-mode does indeed seem quick (though services provided by content providers are slightly slower than the I-mode menu itself - which is to be expected I suppose). I'd like to know how; I don't buy the cHTML-is-faster-than-WML argument, it's going over the same networks as WAP does. Maybe the lack of a WAP proxy speeds things? Pages with images on them are noticeably slower - maybe the bundling of e-moji icons onto the handset itself lets O2 provide a faster portal experience.

The NME service seems to be full of dodgy ô character encoding rubbish - more QA needed there, and no real excuse given that there's only a few I-mode handsets on the market right now.

There's a rich portfolio of games. The mobile Sudoku provided by G-Mode is pretty average, but playable.

NEC need help with their UI work in Europe. I like the external appearance of the handset but using it to send text messages is painful. There are actually 2 completely different messaging menus - one you get by pressing the lovely envelope button, the other by navigating to "messages".

So overall: I-mode looks lovely and I'm impressed, but I suspect they'll need to roll out a better overall UI for their handset for this to really take off.