DoCoMo's Wireless 'Eggy' Gizmo Is Precursor to Future 3G Products
By Peter LandersStaff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
Updated Jan. 30, 2001 12:01 a.m. ET
Last month I bought a curvy gadget from NTT DoCoMo Inc. called Eggy that can take pictures and send and receive video at high speed over a wireless connection. If that description sounds like hype for so-called third-generation mobile phones, it is no coincidence.

Eggy is a sort of test product for the 3G service DoCoMo will roll out in May. Eggy runs on an older Japanese mobile-phone technology known as Personal Handyphone System, or PHS, but it still offers data transmission at 64 kilobits per second -- fast enough to transmit jerky video, and hence a hint of what will be possible with the faster 3G services.

What can I do with Eggy? I like to follow the news, so at any time I can log on to one of several sites and watch video clips of the latest stories. I have taken color pictures with the built-in camera and zapped them instantly to my sister in the U.S. (For an extra monthly fee, I could also send her short videos.) I also have surfed the Internet on the Eggy.

In many ways, Eggy is an amazing product. Costing just over $200 and weighing less than 250 grams, it has enough memory for 150 digital color pictures. It has a clear five-centimeter LCD screen that offers a surprisingly sharp color picture and a 350,000-pixel digital camera.

And it's easy to connect Eggy to a mobile device. For those who want everything in a single unit, DoCoMo sells a wireless card that slots into Eggy. I opted to connect Eggy to a separate mobile phone, but both devices are so light that it's hardly a burden. The PHS technology is fairly widespread in Japan, so Eggy's interactive functions work everywhere in cities and in much of the countryside too.

Yet my experience with Eggy also suggests some of the challenges that DoCoMo, a unit of the giant NTT telecom group, will face when it markets 3G to the masses. One is ease of use. When I took Eggy home and tried to figure out how to register myself for the interactive functions, I was stumped by the 346-page manual, which reads like it was written by a committee of NTT bureaucrats because it describes so many competing NTT services. A DoCoMo spokeswoman says the manuals tend to get long because they must cover every function fully.

So I took Eggy to a DoCoMo shop and sought help. My problems also baffled the saleswoman. Fortunately, manager Yoshiro Suwa was on hand. The dedicated Mr. Suwa spent two hours with my Eggy, and after several calls to the DoCoMo help line he finally was able to configure the device. Together we watched a TV gossip show in which an actress was explaining why she got divorced. Mr. Suwa was so taken with Eggy he said he might get one for himself.

A second problem is content. Eggy has about 100 content providers, but many are just advertising. The news that I watch comes from the same channels as commercial TV. Sure, it is nice to have the freedom to pick the news clips that I'm most interested in, and watch footage of a distant calamity while drinking tea in a cafe somewhere. But this falls well short of an essential service.

I mentioned this problem to Magohiro Aramoto, Sharp Corp.'s executive vice president. Sharp manufactures the Eggy but isn't in charge of services for it. Mr. Aramoto said he also hopes DoCoMo beefs up programming. "It all comes down ... to how much content can be delivered," he told me.

One of the more interesting channels offers professionally shot five-minute movies. One I watched was about a young woman who spots a rainbow. She calls all her friends on her mobile phone to share the moment, but they are too busy to go outside and look at the rainbow. But when she comes home and logs on to her computer, she finds an e-mail message from a friend who says he admired the rainbow too. The end.

These movies are supposed to give people something to do while waiting to meet someone or sitting in the doctor's office. I found it mildly entertaining. The video is a bit jerky because it doesn't contain as many frames per second as normal television. The transmission rate sometimes falls to 32 kilobits a second, making the video even splotchier. But this will get better with real third-generation devices that can offer better picture quality.

Still, it might be easier just to carry a book around for those downtimes during the day -- especially given the price. Eggy itself is cheap, but users in Japan pay 15 yen for every minute online, on top of a 1,900-yen monthly service charge. Including log-on time, it costs about a dollar to watch that short movie. Watching the news would cost another dollar or two. After a few months of use, that adds up to serious money.

All in all, the Eggy function I like most is sending pictures. It's cool to think that I can go almost anywhere in Japan and instantly dispatch my snapshots and videos around the world as e-mail attachments. It's inexpensive, too -- just a few yen for the transmission time. As with the Internet itself, the killer application for third-generation mobile phones may be e-mail.

Write to Peter Landers at peter.landers@wsj.com