J-Phone Co Ltd, owned by Britain's Vodafone Group plc, finally kicked off its third-generation (3G) mobile phone service yesterday after a series of delays prompted by technical problems.
"[The new handsets] have almost all sold out, but there was a very limited number to begin with," said J-Phone spokesman Arata Kurihara, who declined to specify the number of phones shipped or sold.
A video-equipped model by NEC Corp was the only kind on sale at 45 of J-Phone's 2,000 shops nationwide, retailing for Japanese Yen 34,800 (US$287).
J-Phone's "Vodafone Global Standard" service, which can operate both on Japanese and European standards, is seen as a test for parent Vodafone before it is exported overseas. The launch was originally scheduled for December last year, and was again postponed in June as the company fine-tuned its technology.
Initially, the service will only reach the Tokyo metropolitan area and other major cities, or 60 percent of J-Phone's current mobile service area. The rest will be covered by late next year.
J-Phone hopes to have one million 3G subscribers by March 2004, with 20 percent of those expected to be corporate clients.
The new service comes more than a year after rival NTT DoCoMo Inc started its 3G service and eight months behind KDDI Corp.
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