Sony Corp and NTT DoCoMo Inc revealed plans on Tuesday to develop services linking their blockbuster products -- DoCoMo's iMode Internet access cell phone and Sony's PlayStation game console.

The combination of Japan's dominant mobile phone operator and the world's biggest home video game maker may further cement their business lead by raising future business potential, although business from the new service at the moment looks likely to be marginal, at least in the early stage.

Game-making unit Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) and DoCoMo said they will offer an initial batch of new services in December which will allow i-mode users play with a popular character game now available with the PocketStation handheld device.

``The initial new service will enable i-mode users to play games with mobile phones outside and also play the same game with PlayStation at home,'' said a DoCoMo spokesman.

The two firms said they have not decided how to structure fees for users of the new services, including the cost of game software and an adapter to connect the two.

The alliance of DoCoMo and Sony also aims to connect the PlayStation to the upcoming W-CDMA (wideband code division multiple access) broadband technology, which will allow faster data transmission and permit the display of video images and other multimedia applications on mobile devices.

For the moment, analysts said capability of games available on narrowband i-mode mobile phones would be limited, but SCE President Ken Kutaragi told a news conference: ``With broadband wireless technology, specifically DoCoMo's W-CDMA, there will be the possibility of more enriched game content.''

Kutaragi said: ``The W-CDMA standard provides the best mobile network environment that we can imagine. I think this unique Japanese mobile phone culture will also welcomed overseas.''

Sony said it has no plans to offer the service to any cell phone firm except DoCoMo.

Still, the two firms said details of new services under the W-CDMA technology are still up in the air. ``It largely depends on what kind of software will be developed and on demand from our clients,'' said an SCE spokesman.

DoCoMo hopes the new service will further accelerate the growth of ``i-mode'' users. The company last week estimated that the number of users may reach 17 million by the year-end, well above a target of 10 million set early this year.

Keiichi Enoki, chief of the firm's Gateway Business Devision, told the news conference that entertainment content was a main driving force for the growth of i-mode users, which he said is likely to top 10 million by this weekend.

The explosive growth of i-mode, still barely a year old, has confronted DoCoMo with server failures triggered by capacity overload on its system.

DoCoMo President Keiji Tachikawa told reporters last Thursday that the 10 million mark for i-mode, which lets users browse the Internet on a business card-sized screen, would likely be hit in early August, with 40,000 to 50,000 new subscribers signing up for the service each day.

``If you do a quick calculation, the number of users could be as high as 17 million by the end of the year,'' he said.

Sony meanwhile plans to connect its cutting-edge 128-bit PlayStation2 game console, launched in Japan in March, to broadband networks, such as cable television and cell phones, transforming it in into an easy-to-use Internet-access device for tapping the burgeoning e-commerce market.

Sony said shipments of PlayStation2, so far released only in Japan, have topped three million units. Shipments of PSone, the portable version released on July 7 of the earlier PlayStation, have already topped 270,000, it said.

Some analysts see the hardware becoming a major platform for Internet access in the home, where the use of the Internet has grown rapidly. One in five Japanese -- just over 27 million people -- has an Internet connection, according to government data released in June.