Dusseldorf (dpa) - A year ago, Europe's mobile-phone industry was standing by for an i-Mode craze: the Japanese-devised wireless Internet service looked set to become a cult among up-to-the-minute youth.
KPN of the Netherlands launched the service, which offers music and pictures on specially adapted cellphones, in three countries.
"It's fast, colourful and sound-rich and brings a new quality to your mobile," declared an analyst at the Xonio.com news service.
But the story has not played KPN's way. Whereas more than 30 million Japanese have now signed up for NTT DoCoMo's i-Mode service, market uptake in Europe has been disappointing, with just 236,000 customers in the three launch countries at the end of 2002.
KPN saw i-Mode as a means of quickly grabbing more market share from rivals, but instead it has turned out the sole provider to suffer a net loss of customers in the German market in the year.
KPN's German operation, E-Plus, is the third-largest of the four German mobile networks and E-Plus chief executive Uwe Bergheim forecast up to 600,000 German i-Mode users within a year.
But out of 3.4 million E-Plus subscribers, only 123,000 had signed up for the new mobile service by December. Dutch and Belgian figures were also poor.
In its latest quarterly report, KPN still declares optimism it can obtain 1 million i-Mode users by the end of 2003.
"i-Mode is a trial balloon for the next generation of mobile communications," explains Matthias Plica, head of Xonio Online.
It has not proved a runaway success, but has not been a flop either, because KPN has won vital knowledge about its customers that will give it a head start when UMTS (universal mobile telecommunications system) services start later this year.
E-Plus spokeswoman also rejects mockery of the slow uptake, saying, "i-Mode customers are the ones who make the most intensive use of our service." Average monthly sales per customer are high.
Users now have a choice of about 150 content providers on i-Mode, spanning news, entertainment, online games, shopping and banking.
Commentators say KPN's launch was made harder by the lack of competition among handset manufacturers. Till late 2002, only one model of European-market phone could handle i-Mode at all. Now there are three, meaning more choice and faster supply.
Siemens and other manufacturers are set to unveil new i-Mode phones at CeBIT, the huge computer and telecommunications trade show that opens in the German city of Hanover on March 12.
The i-Mode launch was also made difficult by the arrival last year of multimedia messaging service (MMS).
A clever television advertising campaign by Vodafone illustrated how teenagers could use camera-cum-mobiles to brag about their new love interests to all their friends. Among young Europeans, MMS quickly became one of the hottest things to have at a party.
Transmission of colour snaps by mobile phone now looks likely to be a key use of UMTS when it arrives.
KPN was the last of the four providers to get MMS up and running in Germany and still does not have it integrated into i-Mode.
That delay has cost it customers and it now lags well behind Vodafone, which has wrapped camera phones and MMS into an all-in-one package, Vodafone Live, that is walking out of shops in droves.
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