TOKYO, JAPAN, March 17, 2000 -- NTT DoCoMo today announced that on March 15 it registered the five millionth subscriber to its i-mode service, which provides direct access to the Internet via cellular phones.

DoCoMo launched the i-mode service just 13 months ago. It previously forecasted that subscribers would total about 4.8 million users by the end of March, so i-mode's popularity has exceeded even DoCoMo's high expectations.

A chief reason for the success is that Websites can be adapted to i-mode easily and quickly, since the system uses the Web-based HTML programming language. A total of 356 companies were using DoCoMo i-mode portal Websites to provide mobile online services, such as banking, news, games and more, as of March 15.

In addition, more than 7,000 independent Websites not connected to the portal are also accessible via DoCoMo's i-mode service.

Additional information regarding i-mode is available at here.