Mobile Phone Messaging

Introduction
Phone or something more?
Situation in Japan
P-mail, C-mail, EZ-mail, ...what are they?

Introduction

21^st century is already on its way and more or less it is already known to be the IT Century. With the recent development of science and technology the need of exchanging information is overflowing the current networks. Higher speeds and price cut in the field nowadays allow virtually anybody to have personal communication. Traditional letters and telegrams are gradually substituted by electronic mail, normal telephone services are going digital. Finding its way is also personal mobile communication represented by cellular phones and other handhelds.

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Phone or something more?

LSI allow more and more functions to be incorporated in a single chip, while keeping the prices reasonable. Although many customers are fascinated with the glorious advertisements and commercials showing the new technologies, only a very small portion of them ever use (not to mention understand) more than 60% of device functions. Every service provider is trying to get more and more customers by providing unimaginable set of services. Starting from normal answering machine capability, calculator, memo tab, alarm and schedule to the more futuristic voice recognition, web access and video conference.

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Situation in Japan

Japan, a country world known as the motherland of mini- and micro- (nowadays nano-) electronics, with its high standard of living is of course on the edge of the mobile communication as well. According to a recent survey about half of the population owns a mobile phone, which puts the country in the world top-connected class. Currently there are three main service providers known to the broad public as DoCoMo, Cellular and J-Phone groups.

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P-mail, C-mail, EV-mail, ...what are they?

Short answer: Message Exchange System-s (MES).

And a long answer should deal with every ?-mail on its own. Now matter what the provider calls it, all the MES-s offer more or less the same: by using only the mobile phone one can send and receive certain limited form of e-mail. How limited depends both on the service provider, payment plan and the mobile phone model.

For example, J-Phone's SkyMail MES allows up to 128 bytes per message body and the price is 5 yen per message sent. Receiving is free of charge. For additional 300 yen per month, one can get a full Internet address (something like YourName@jp-d.ne.jp) and can send "normal" e-mail to anybody for the same 5 yen per message. Unfortunately there are problems when one wants to read Internet e-mail sent from computer because of the encoding scheme...

Another example is Cellular's C-mail allowing 100 bytes per 3 yen price (+ 300 yen per month). One can even read HTML formatted messages by using the EZ Web service.

DoCoMo is offering his clients a bit more sophisticated MES. It allows up to 2 KB for 10 yen.

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To be continued...