As was announced Expo (not that many noticed, in the wake of the Geneon and ADV deals), FUNimation has launched its mobile anime initiative over at JumpInMobile.TV (note that it’s a page for mobile phones, so it looks ugly in a desktop browser).

The service lets you download an entire season of one of the available shows (Gunslinger Girl, Moon Phase, and Galaxy Railways– although if I remember correctly, Galaxy Railways comes free when you buy one of the other two shows) for $4.99. But instead of coming to you in individual episodes, you watch the episodes in 5-minute chunks.

I’d love to poke around and review the service more for you, especially since I’m wondering if 5-minute chunks will work– let’s round down episode times to 20 minutes, times 13 episodes is 260 minutes, divided by 5 is 52…it just seems like if you want to watch a significant chunk of the series on, say, a lengthy car ride, it might be a nuisance to have to do it like that. Though on the other hand, downloads on phones tend to be slow, so it’s probably better to break it up into chunks. Hm…oh, also, I assume it’s dub, because watching subs on a cell phone sounds rough.

Anyway! As I was saying, I’d love to give it a shot myself, but this service is only for Sprint and AT&T users, and I have Verizon (♥). If any of you try it, let me know how it goes!

According to this press release on BusinessWire, the Japanese company Voice Bank is already bringing manga to iPhones in Japan via a program called the “iPhone Manage Converter™.”

Well, okay, that’s jumping the gun a little - no manga has actually been released for it; just software that will make it possible. And there are PLANS to partner with manga companies to make manga available on iPhones. But nothing’s out just yet.

But meanwhile here in the States, TOKYOPOP is working overtime to make cell phone manga the Next Big Thing, though I’d like to see them actually go to the effort of making a licensed title or two available as well as their OEL stuff, personally.

Looks like I’ll be able to liveblog. ♥ VIZ’s panel starts in 30 minutes. I’ll be liveblogging it on the forums, right here.

Right then, I only caught the tail end of TOKYOPOP’s part of the GoComics panel, but hit the jump for the list of all the titles that they’re making available on cell phones -all OEL titles. I’m not 100% sure that I got them all since I just slipped in, but I’m betting other people will get more thorough reports up soon - I’ll update this entry when I have all the info.

That said, I THINK - and this is what they talked about before I got there, so I could be way off - that what they’re doing is offering package accounts, so you’ll have access to as much (or as little) of their titles as you want.

Right then, the list. Read more…