i-mode
The world's first mass-market mobile internet, launched in Japan in 1999 with 176 tiny pictures that became emoji, switched off in March 2026
i-mode was NTT DoCoMo's mobile internet service, launched in Japan on 22 February 1999. It put email, news, banking, ringtones and thousands of paid sites on ordinary phones years before the smartphone, ran on cHTML pages, and billed by the packet with DoCoMo collecting payments for content owners. It peaked at around 49 million subscribers in 2010. It is also where Shigetaka Kurita's 176 emoji shipped. DoCoMo closed it on 31 March 2026 with the 3G FOMA network.
Timeline [edit]
- 1997
-
1 November 1997
other
J-Phone ships 90 emoji on the SkyWalker DP-211SW
The first emoji set on a phone, on a handset that sold badly.
- 1999
-
22 February 1999
Launch
i-mode launches in Japan
cHTML pages, packet billing and Kurita's 176 emoji.
- 2001
-
March 2001
Peak
More than 20 million subscribers in two years
- 2002
-
March 2002
other
i-mode licensed abroad, starting with KPN in Europe
Most overseas launches failed.
- 2010
-
2010
Peak
About 49 million subscribers
The high point.
-
October 2010
other
Japanese carrier emoji enter Unicode 6.0
The pictures outlive the platform.
- 2019
-
29 October 2019
Shutdown announced
DoCoMo says i-mode will end in March 2026
New contracts stop; 7.6 million lines left.
- 2026
-
31 March 2026
Shutdown
i-mode and the FOMA 3G network are switched off
How it looked [edit]
The site through time
Browse docomo.ne.jp as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:
Ownership [edit]
Key figures [edit]
| Metric | Value | As of | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Registered accounts ▲ | 49 million | 2010 | Reported Peak subscribers |
| Registered accounts | 7.6 million | 29 October 2019 | Reported Lines left when the closure was announced |
Confirmed official figures · Reported media, cites a source · Estimated analyst or our estimate
Why it shut down [edit]
Official line: NTT DoCoMo stopped selling i-mode handsets and taking new contracts in 2019 and set the end of the service for the end of March 2026, tied to the shutdown of its 3G FOMA network. It said contract numbers had fallen far enough, and that resources were going to 5G. About 7.6 million lines were left at the announcement, against a peak of roughly 49 million in 2010.
Our analysis: i-mode did not lose because it was bad. It lost because it was early and Japanese. Its packet-billing, its micropayments and its content ecosystem were years ahead of anything in Europe or America, and DoCoMo exported it to a dozen countries, where it mostly failed against operators who did not want a Japanese menu on their phones. Then the iPhone arrived with the actual web instead of a curated deck, and a market that had spent a decade optimising for cHTML pages on tiny screens found it had built the wrong thing beautifully. What survived is the part nobody planned: the 176 pictures.
History [edit]
Everything Japan did first
i-mode opened on 22 February 1999, put together at NTT DoCoMo by a small team under Keiichi Enoki, with Mari Matsunaga, a magazine editor, deciding what it should feel like and Takeshi Natsuno building the business model. It was not the web. Pages were written in cHTML, a stripped-down HTML for a screen the size of a stamp, sites were reached through a menu on the handset, and you paid by the packet rather than by the minute, which meant reading was cheap and idle time was free.
The clever part was money. DoCoMo let anyone publish an i-mode site, took a small commission on subscriptions billed through the phone bill, and paid the rest to the site owner. That gave Japan a paid mobile content market in 1999: news, horoscopes, banking, train times, ringtones, games and, of course, everything else. Within two years i-mode had over twenty million subscribers, and by 2010 around 49 million.
The 176 pictures
The team needed a way to compress meaning into a service where a message was 250 characters and the screen fitted twelve. Shigetaka Kurita, then in his twenties, drew a set of 176 symbols on a 12 by 12 pixel grid, taking cues from manga, weather charts and Chinese characters: sun, cloud, umbrella, heart, telephone, a tiny pile with a face. They shipped in February 1999 and every Japanese carrier copied the idea within a year.
Kurita was not first. J-Phone had put 90 emoji, including the poop, on the SkyWalker DP-211SW in November 1997, but that phone sold badly and the set went nowhere. It was i-mode's reach that made the pictures a habit, and that habit is why Google and Apple pushed the Japanese carrier sets into Unicode in 2010, where they became the emoji everyone now uses. The Museum of Modern Art acquired Kurita's original 176 in 2016.
The domain today
i-mode ended on 31 March 2026, together with the FOMA 3G network it depended on. DoCoMo is still at docomo.ne.jp, now selling 5G. Before the closure it began licensing its early emoji designs, which is a strange fate for a set of pictures drawn to save bytes.
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Sources [edit]
- NTT Docomo ends i-mode mobile service that pioneered the emoji Nippon.com 1 April 2026 [archived]
- NTT Docomo to discontinue decades-old i-mode internet service in 2026 Japan Today 29 October 2019 [archived]
- NTT Docomo completes shutdown of 3G FOMA and i-mode services Telecompaper 1 April 2026 [archived]
- NTT Docomo to license early emoji designs ahead of i-mode closure Telecompaper 1 February 2026
- i-mode Wikipedia 1 January 2026 [archived]
- Correcting the record on the first emoji set Emojipedia 8 March 2019 [archived]
Last verified: 18 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).