Last week's decision by NTT DoCoMo Inc. to scale back the introduction of third generation (3G) mobile phone services confirmed the skepticism of many observers about its launch date. But it proved the company was willing to cut prices to allow more consumers to access its richer, higher-speed content.

Speculation before the announcement on April 26 was that, at the rate charged to current i-mode users of 0.3 yen for one packet (128 bytes, or about 12 Roman characters' worth) of information, the cost of downloading even a 1-minute movie clip would be several thousand yen.

But according to NTT DoCoMo, the 4,000 users of its scaled-back service, beginning May 30, will only pay 29 yen per minute to watch rich-content services such as short news clips and sports highlights or to talk on a real-time videophone -- about the same as current mobile rates.