O2's iMode mobile portal service now has more than 250,000 customers, after six months of operation, and it has 150 content providers across 13 genres, according to an announcement at a recent roundtable event.

However, experts were divided over whether the service will eventually be as popular as O2 predicts. Graham Riddell, head of content management at O2, said the service is the company's fastest-growing offering outside Japan. It serves over one million page impressions each day and over three-quarters of iMode customers actively use it within any 30-day period.

"IMode is cheap to get up and running for content providers," said Riddell. "[Many have found] they've recouped their costs and are now investing more in the sites."
Riddell added that O2 is talking to financial institutions to provide more online banking services via iMode, to complement those already offered by Egg and Norwich Union. "The financial firms are keeping an eye on their customers to see where they're going," he said. "We have the technical capabilities to offer full banking services and [in time] they'll think it's worth doing from a customer perspective."

Mark Blowers of analyst firm Butler Group said iMode provides a user-friendly service, which makes it quick and easy to access content. "O2 could get traction that way, but it must be competitive with other ways of [accessing] content from the internet. If the service is cheaper or provides content everyone wants [then it could take off]," he added.

John Delaney of analyst Ovum said he expected iMode uptake to grow. "It falls between the traditional fairly closed content-centric portals [like O2 Active and Vodafone Live] and the internet," he added. "It has potential for people who are not just interested in accessing the internet but need guidance and support, and it provides an optimised version of [some sites] such as eBay, which people find attractive."

Delaney denied that the coming .mobi domain for mobile sites would harm iMode's prospects. He said .mobi merely presents one of many ways to adapt content for use on mobiles. However, he added that O2 would have to increase the internet-type services it offers on iMode to attract more custom.

Jag Minhas, O2's chief iMode architect, said the firm would probably open its specifications to more third-party content providers at the end of the year, and revealed that customers would soon be able to access their web mail via the service.
Features planned for next year include an RSS aggregator, called iChannel, which will appear high up on the user interface; and an instant messaging (IM) client.