Oliver Thylmann has tasted a piece of Japan right here in Europe - or in Germany, to be more exact. Read on to find out what Oliver thinks of the NEC N21i and i-mode in the flesh.
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Recently, German carrier e-plus launched their i-mode service, licensing the name and back-end technology from NTT DoCoMo and making available the NEC N21i, a polyphonic-color-GPRS-clamshell-phone from the leading mobile phone provider in the Japanese market (previously covered). This is the only set-up that will allow the use of i-mode services in Germany at this time, but a Toshiba phone is arriving later this summer, while all WAP 2.0 compliant handsets will be able to access i-mode content. So far, German is only the second country outside Japan to launch i-mode services, and we decided to see whether i-mode really is a step ahead of WAP as is frequently claimed.
The NEC N21i
 | The i-mode symbol on the outside can be set to flash if a call, SMS or e-mail has arrived, or if the phone requires interaction in other ways
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The most striking features of this 120g clamshell model phone are the color screen and the capability to use polyphonic ringtones. Of course, it’s an i-mode phone with GPRS capabilities, but that needs to be explained before it is understood, even though it is very prominent in the menu. Both the color screen and the ring tones will - and did, in my experience - make a lot of heads turn.
After charging it for the first time, once opened, the screen gently dims up to show the big i for i-mode right smack in the middle of the screen (in color, of course). That big i is also found on the outside of the phone, where it serves an alert purpose, but more on that later. With a color display and the advanced features of the phone combined with its small size and light weight, one drawback becomes quite apparent early one; it has a mere 160 hours of standby time and 2 hours of talk time. In particular, i-mode over GPRS draws a lot of power.
 | If you hadn't discovered you had an i-mode color phone before, the i-mode sign smack dab in the middle of the screen will certainly clue you in
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The main menu key is in the middle above the navi-pad and, when pressed, fills the screen with 3 columns and 4 rows of small, colorful and animated icons that show the way to the different phone features. There is service, i-mode, messages, call diversion, screen settings, phone settings, security, call lists, call info, network, phone book, and accessories.
To the left and right of the Menu button, there are two other buttons providing direct access to the mail feature and i-mode. These buttons are however not configurable, which means that for reading an SMS, a long series of key presses must be performed since there's no hardware buttons that provide direct access to the SMS features of the phone. Interestingly enough, the main SMS user interface consists of a white screen with a portion of the received message in black text and an asterisk next to any unread messages. No color there. For writing an SMS, the T9 input method is available but will be the same language as the one currently used in the phone, which might be an annoyance for users that sometimes exchange messages with friends or collegues using foreign languages. The e-mail button is easily reachable though, and this is the feature e-plus wants customers to be using.
The e-mail feature makes use of GPRS push technology, which means that new e-mails are delivered right to the inbox, the phone rings, and e-mails can be read and replied to right then and there - much like the SMS experience. Users can also read and write e-mail from the e-plus web site, since writing long mails using a numeric keypad could be somewhat painful. Thankfully, the address book has a field for several e-mail addresses per person which means that they can be automatically entered via a few clicks. On top of that, it's possible to attach a header and footer as well as a melody to e-mails, although this is dependant on whether the attachment will increase the size of the e-mail beyond the allowed size limit. In our tests, attaching any one of 3 melodies we had downloaded previously failed.
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