I stumbled across this item on Ewan's blog, but haven't been able to access the relevant page on The Guardian. According to the story, O2 are planning on closing their i-mode service due to a lack of takeup.

Mobile phone company O2 is understood to be dumping its i-mode mobile internet service in Britain, owing to low take-up and a lack of attractive handsets.

The company, owned by Spain's Telefónica, launched i-mode less than two years ago with its largest advertising campaign since rebranding from BT Cellnet.

The £10m spent has brought in only 260,000 active users in Britain.

I would disagree with Ewan's contention that the i-mode service was a pathetic, slow, rubbish wap service (since I provide an i-mode site myself and have had no problems with delivering a good service through it - comparable to normal WAP at least, and it's certainly MUCH easier to tailor pages in CHTML that WML).