i-mode is a technology that was first rolled out by Japanese mobile operators.

The combination of the technology and the marketing model has made it an enormous success in Japan, and now some European operators have also rolled out i-mode.

The technology is interesting because i-mode phones can load chtml content, which stands for compact html.

The beauty of chtml, unlike wap, is that it can be viewed by an ordinary PC web browser, and that the content can be written by people who write ordinary web content.  It is simply a cut down version of html.  It supports only gif images, and does not support tables, image maps, multiple fonts and styles of fonts, background colors and images, frames, style sheets, and the original phones supported only black and white.  So this page for example should load on an i-mode phone.

Read more about chtml here and here.

The new wap2 standard looks remarkably similar.  I suspect that it would be easy to write content that is viewable on both chtml and wap2 phones.

Homepage