Software makes PDF content accessible on cell phones for viewing, searching and interacting with links.Adobe Systems Inc. and Japanese mobile telephone provider NTT DoCoMo Inc. announced Wednesday that NTT DoCoMo will use Adobe Reader LE for its 3G FOMA mobile phones. This partnership will provide DoCoMo customers using its i-mode service access to content in Adobe's ubiquitous PDF.
Adobe developed this newest version of Adobe Reader together with Access Co. Ltd., according to Ridwan Huq, product manager for Adobe Reader LE. Access has optimized the Adobe source code for i-mode services, exposing functionalities in the PDF format for the mobile environment, Huq said.
Such functionalities will include features found in PC versions of Adobe Reader, including page layout rotation and text search. In addition, mobile users will have the capacity to leverage a given PDF document to dial a phone number, send e-mail or access a Web page.
"Now you can take the PDF file with you, on whatever device. In Japan, phones are used more than PCs," Huq continued.
John Jackson, senior analyst at Boston-based research firm The Yankee Group, concurred with Huq's assessment, noting that the millions of Japanese mobile phone consumers are way ahead of their United States counterparts in the way they use their devices.
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"It's another manifestation of the way in which the mobile phone, in many places throughout the world, [is] used for more than just voice-centric capabilities," Jackson said. "The technologies you see in Japan today tend to show up in Western Europe tomorrow and North America a month later, relatively speaking."
Huq said the possibilities created by the accessibility of PDF documents on a mobile network can mean that in the future, a conference call can bring about a new type of business collaboration, in which data is being sent in real time as people are discussing an issue or solution.
Huq stressed that Adobe considers the mobile space a very important channel for the company. "It's the next frontier, [and] we are providing applications and solutions that offer high impact and reliable content for [mobile users]."
Moreover, Huq said, Adobe's move into the mobile space is a natural extension of its overall business strategy, as handsets become more powerful. Adobe is using a similar strategy to the one the company used when it proliferated desktops with Acrobat and Reader, according to Huq.
At the same time, Yankee analyst Jackson pointed out that DoCoMo, for its part, does not really know how this endeavor will turn out.
"It's hard to peg the next killer app in this space," Jackson said. "They're just a bunch of experiments, and it will take some work to figure out which one will work. Still, the companies that find this out first will be the ones who capitalize on it first."
