Tokyo - Japan's largest mobile operator NTT DoCoMo and internet giant Google of the United States plan to cooperate in Japan's highly innovative mobile internet market, the companies said Thursday in Tokyo. The search functions of Google, the largest internet search engine in the world, are to be integrated into DoCoMo's i-mode service, which was founded in 1999.
In the future, i-mode users will find it easier to use Google services like Gmail or YouTube on their mobile phones.
Japan was the birthplace of the mobile internet and, with its high level of innovation and demanding consumers, it was also the most widely developed market, Google vice president Omid Kordestani said.
Experts estimate that Japan is two or three years more advanced than Europe in mobile internet use, with considerably more business being done over the mobile phone in Japan.
A reason for the advanced state of mobile technology in Japan is that costs are much lower and the Japanese are willing to spend much more on their mobile telephones than Europeans.
For example, the Japanese send four times as many text messages as Europeans.
The new partnership between Google and NTT DoCoMo indicates a change in the way the Japanese mobile giant does business: previously it arranged all its own telecommunications services, from creating the infrastructure to setting up its own services, the Nikkei economics newspaper reported recently.
New mobile phones in Japan will soon have Google technology like Google Maps available as a standard function.
