No i-mode for India

No real surprises here, but with Vodafone’s $11bn acquisition of Hutchison Essar in the bag, NTT DoCoMo has pulled the plug on its i-mode plans for India.

Japanese operator DoCoMo and Hutch had signed a contract in December with an eye to launching i-mode in India this year. But “due to the changes in business environment, both companies concluded that it would be difficult to launch i-mode service at this time and agreed not to proceed,” the Japanese firm said.

The issue here is that DoCoMo’s i-mode platform, which is a whole mobile internet ecosystem, is more or less in direct competition with Vodafone’s own Live! services platform.