I-mode hits Europe with NEC N600i 3G Phone

Greece is the first country outside of Japan to offer NTT’s 3G i-Mode service. Cosmote, Greece’s top mobile operator is receiving shipments from NEC of their N600i mobile terminal. The N600i is capable of handling dual mode W-CDMA and GSM/GPRS.

Ericsson’s mobile platform was used in creating this handset, the first major breakthrough for the Swedish company since its division of Sony Ericsson.

The handset also uses NEC’s digital base band LSI technology. The compact clam-shell design offers a full 1.3 megapixel integrated camera, 2-inch 65k LCD display capable of displaying pictures and MPEG4 movies. It has 20MB of internal memory with optional trans-flash memory card support.

I-mode is huge, with approximately 50,000,000 subscribers worldwide; 5,000,000 of which are outside of Japan. Cellcom in Israel, O2 in Great Britain, and StarHub in Singapore have all signed agreements with NTT DoCoMo and are expected to launch i–mode services shortly.