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I use the developer.phone.com simulator to develope WML on WINblows. Does anyone out there have a good WAP simulator for developing WAP games with Linux?

first off, bozo, the deragatory word for italians is wop. and B) .wap is for Wireless Application Protocol and three: shut up you fuck.

I'm using Sprint PCS in the USA (Chicago area, actually) and find text messaging really handy. It could be a lot better, of course...

Many of my friends work for the same company where they have two-way text pagers with a tiny QWERTY keyboard. Most of them don't carry cellphones all the time (and when they do, it's just the 'on-call' phone they sometimes carry for work). They can send email to my phone, and I can send it to their pagers. This works great for low-priority messages -- anything we'd use email for if we were tied to our desks all day. For high-priority messages we just pick up the phone, of course. (Or send email that says, "Call me!" :-)

The downside for me is that Sprint doesn't support email directly to the phone, nor does it support composing replies well. I have it set up so that I receive mail via SMS. Of course, SMS has a 100 character limit, which really bites. Especially when the 'From:' line and quoted text is counted. I ended up creating an email-to-SMS proxy that strips out the garbage, and also forwards the original text to my Yahoo account. So, if I need to I can connect to Yahoo and see the full text. And I have to connect to Yahoo to compose and send mail. Sprint charges by the minute for connect time (pay for a block of time up front, or pay about 35 cents/minute if you go over your time limit) and there's no way to compose messages offline. Talk about a cash cow for Sprint!

Entering text on the keypad really isn't bad, even without the predictive entry. It could be better, though. I have a Sanyo 4000 phone. Text entry for its addressbook is really nice. Press a key repeatedly to cycle through upper and lower case letters, and press [1] to cycle through common symbols. The browser (supplied by Phone.com) isn't nearly as convenient. I have to use a menu item to shift between uppercase, lowercase, and symbols. So my email messages tend to be monocase.

Mobile text messaging is really nice in a lot of situations where you don't need the immediacy of a voice call, or if you want to broadcast a message to a group. ("Hey everyone, pizza and movies at my house tonight!") This is what's going to drive the wireless revolution, not that silly "Shop Amazon.com anytime, anywhere from your phone!" idiocy.

I don't see what the fuss is, to be honest. WAP is the easiest technology conversion I've had to make in the last two years.

HOW to do WAP ( Taken from http://ali.as/ )
Simply set the MIME type for .wml files ( or anything else ) to text/vnd.wap.wml and that's it! WAP server setup complete.

Example: http://ali.as/wap/wap.wml ( doesn't work in a normal browser )

The other thing you want to do is set index.wml as an index file... since every keystroke they have to type in will be a pain for mobile users, at least the phone ones anyway.

Next, CGI ( or servlets, or whatever ).
Given you now know the magic WAP MIME type ( text/vnd.wap.wml, simply get your program to spit out the MIME type. Perl example would be

print "Content-type: text/vnd.wap.wml\n\n";

I imagine it would not be THAT hard to change the Content-type line of the header in JSP... A collegue is mentioning to me that all you need to do is something like

Method addHeader( 'Content-type', 'text/vnd.wap.wml' ); in the interface HttpServletResponse in the class javax.servlet.http

All you have to do then is write in WML, which isn't that difficult to learn.

To do that, I highly recommend the WAP Phone Simulator provided in the Unwired Planet SDK 4.0

AdamK

Everybody can test this portal by using one of these wap toolkits:
Ericsson
Motorola
Nokia
phone.com

Web browsing technology will be standard in the next generation of cell phones. Want more info? check out this press release What it really means is that phone.com basically has this whole thing locked up.

Web browsing technology will be standard in the next generation of cell phones. Want more info? check out this press release What it really means is that phone.com basically has this whole thing locked up.