Japan's NTT DoCoMo has signed on to offer Google's search, maps, e-mail, YouTube and other mobile services to subscribers with its i-mode handsets, the companies said.

According to the Associated Press, Google will become the default search engine on i-mode phones sometime this spring. With the carrier's more than 50 million subscribers, that's a lot of potential searches.

Something that might be an even bigger deal for Google is the possibility of DoCoMo using its Android mobile operating system in some handsets. That won't happen for a while, though, since Android is supposed to be released in the second half of the year. But, as is the way with most major software, who knows when it will really be available.