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If you have a colour phone, can they sell you boobs..?

Flesh tones are going to sell colour phones for i-mode in Europe, according to German KPN subsidiary, Eplus Telecom, which launches Saturday - and breasts are the "killer app."

According to Reuters, KPN Telecom's E-Plus telecom unit is introducing i-mode to the German market at the annual CeBIT technology trade show in Hanover. But this alternative to 3G UMTS technology isn't aiming its services at the mobile business market. Instead, it's gone for the approach won Virgin so many headlines earlier in the week, and is going for the short and curlies - soft-porn.

The logic is that iMode phones will have big enough displays for excited customers to be able to tell what gender the human in the image is, and will be colour, so it will compete with grey-scale WAP phones on the market today.

Just in case you wondered whether this might be a one-off, amongst lots of serious business applications, KPN has also announced that it will support find-a-date services over iMode.

The headlines are what matters, of course. But behind the scenes, the argument will be that "if we can provide images of high enough resolution to do attractive girlie pix, then we can do serious applications, too."

The logic may be spurious, though. Already, GPRS phones with colour displays are being sold; and while GPRS pricing data is very hard to compare, it's hard to see people buying dual-mode phones to handle GSM and i-mode, just for the sake of getting "official" rude pix.

Some observers believe that rude pix will become a major part of "content" - but that most rude pix on the phone networks are almost certainly going to be DIY services, many observers believe, as boys and girls swap images of themselves using the next generation of tiny digital Web-phone cameras. But this won't be exclusive to i-mode.