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Toolkit Available For WAP programming
mge writes: "According to this story in some local Aussie IT pages, Nokia is looking for developers to make online games for mobile phones and it has established R&D centres in Helsinki, Belgrade and Sydney to provide content for the company's new mobile entertainment centre. There's a WAP Client Toolkit, Game Construction Toolkit, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), documentation and sample source code for applications to download. An Australian company, Fluffy Spider Technologies, is also offering assistance to game developers. They have posted free code online for a simple Tic Tac Toe game. Of course, they want games, but how about automated dial-ins (to take advantage of lower call/ISP rates), smart forms etc ... " Well someone needs to start giving all our smart phones something to think about, eh?
I believe the official slashdotian position on this subject has already been handed down by Alan Cox. :-)
To paraphrase : "WAP Sucks".
Free Music
Phones that can access normal websites would be nice, but how useful would they be? My Palm IIIx has a web browser and native IP, but unless the sites have been reformatted for PDA use, they are basically unusable - too much horizontal+vertical scrolling. So in practice, reformatting/filtering gateways are essential.
UK WAP pricing is not too bad - 5 pence (= 7.5 US cents) per minute from Orange, and that's after you've exhausted the bundled minutes that month. However, it's very easy to end up with 10 minute calls, largely due to the crap text input via the keypad - I really want to see stylus input with Palm's Graffiti or something very similar.
In fact, the Palm format may win in the end - just use a Bluetooth-connected earpiece, and maybe voice-activated dialling, and you can use any PDA format you like, since you'll normally just use the earpiece, with your PDA/phone in your pocket or bag. This would address the large screen issue as well as text input - my Palm screen is much more usable for WAP browsing, and I can enter a URL much quicker than on my Nokia 7110 WAP phone.
I find many WAP sites don't work with the 7110, maybe 20 per cent or so - it's not a well defined/implemented standard at present.
It may be a dead end, but I find it useful for limited things that I have already bookmarked - e.g. I got the weather forecast for London today as I was walking in to work, and the whole call lasted 18 seconds including connect time, i.e. cost of approx 7 cents US.
Typing URLs is a pain, true, but being able to create bookmarks to arbitrary sites is essential - particularly if you can beam them from a Palm (I can already beam address book entries between the Nokia and the Palm, why not bookmarks?).
Google's service for WAP is very impressive - combined search engine and HTML to WML gateway.
I don't care about the government tracking my cell phone very much considering its really expensive to use the equipment needed to triangulate a mobile phone. If I reall'y want to be sneaky I won't need some Unix-like OS on my phone I'll just pull out the battery. I know, I ought to be a spy. The only real problem with "open sourcing" a mobile phone is to figure out what is doing what on the inside of the phone. Anyone with some experience with microcircuitry and radio can do that with some effort and the right tools (the right tools being specification docs from Motorola). Then of course you need to port Linux to it which is a rather dumb idea. A monolithic kernel with protected memory? Sure. How about you bust out a teeny tiny RTOS like QNX for your dirty hax0r needs. Most phones have the capability of "checking on phone networks" back in the day this was called phreaking. Mobile phones aren't much different. It all seems like alot of effort when all I really want to do is call my and order pizza on the way home so the pizza dude shows up when I do so I don't need to wait for the pizza.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I'm a web application developer in Canada, and what I'm noticing is that investor types jump out of their chair at the mention of WAP, but it's hard to find a soul that knows what's actually going on with it. I would suspect that it's largely because there is not a single phone/service combination in Canada at least that allows you to type in a url and go to it - wml or not. You're restricted to whatever boring content Bell gives you.. do we really need more sports scores and horoscopes?
There are several things causing that situation:
- Right now there just isn't very much random WAP content available, so there is no point in a "goto URL" feature.
- The cellular carriers don't like the idea of users going just anywhere -- that diminishes the leverage they have with content providers.
- From a usability standpoint, most cellular phone users aren't interested in typing in a 30 character URL with their keypad.
But eventually there will be enough WAP stuff out there that omiting the "goto URL" feature will lose the carrier some customers. It'll come.
Ever hear of Imode? It's likely to blow the doors off the WAP standard. Practically exponential growth here in Japan.
Imode is pretty awesome, but it is specific to NTT DoCoMo (the dominant cellular carrier in Japan). While DoCoMo is a powerhouse, I don't see its standard being able to take over the world. In fact, DoCoMo is a member of the WAP forum!
The rest of the world is behind Japan in terms of wireless technology, so the rest of the world will start with WAP (which they can and have deployed today) and WAP will grow with their networks.
Human beings are social animals but we undertaken specific activities in specific spaces. (see Worlds). Now cell phones are associated with work (business) and communications. Is it worthwhile also turning it into a game-boy type of system? If a business saw a highly paid worker killing time playing with their Palm (OK stop sniggering in the corner) or cell phone I suspect that they will question your productivity or dedication. If you're driving, you certainly won't be playing at the same time and if you're taking the bus, then it's likely you're not going to be affording the pay/minute for on-line games. If you're at home, then you'd likely to already have a computer or sonsole handy.
I'm not knocking the idea but building a better mousetrap doesn't always lead to higher utilisation. One study revealed that the cheap wooden mousetrap significantly outsold a plastic box with pheromes because it ignored the fact that housewives didn't like throwing out an expensive looking box and the fact that if they saw a dead mouse in the wooden trap, they could get their husbands to dispose of the carcass immediately whereas they had to look in the box themselves. In short, the social circumstances may have subtle but significant factors in purchasing decisions.
So will people play games with strangers on their phones given the relative small screen-space, the low-battery life, and high relative costs?
LL
I have to agree with the original author. The Palm-style display is as doomed as CGA. I expect an ARM and Mozilla based, full color, 64+MB RAM, 4+GB storage palmtop browser to be available in the next 3 years. There's no real reason to limit screen resolution (I'm happy with 800x600 on a Palm-sized screen, and can read it just fine), but then again perhaps eye-pieces will become popular and screen resolution will be restricted only by available video RAM.
The real question is bandwidth. I'm honestly amazed that we're not already doing 1+Mb/s wireless as a standard part of laptops. My vague understanding of the problem is that in the US, the FCC is really being a pain in the ass about it all. That eventually has to come, though.
So, if all of this comes together, where will that leave WAP? Another footnote in the rapid expansion of the technology. WAP is an interim solution, and as such it is eventually doomed. That doesn't mean it's useless for now, though.
I find it very amusing that HTML and WAP are still touted as the great e-business this and the great interface that.
This is static screens which you download from a server. This is the sort of technology that only someone on a limited connection could love. In two years time we'll have upto 2Mbs on a mobile phone, we'll have the same or much better at home.
Does anyone really think that HTML and WAP provide the sort of functionality that will be possible over a 2Mbs connection ? Ladies and gentleman, I await the stunning announcement from Sun, MS and IBM that the new way forward for the broadband generation is.... client server.
We've almost caught up with the Star project, just a couple more years to go.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
in a few months nintendo will come out with a phone-extension for your gameboy.
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
Will you take a rain check until I have some up-moderation points ? Good comments.
I've tried to feed WAP / WML to Palms. Total disaster, the WAP protocol is so squeezed dow to fit phones that it's unworkable for anything bigger than a Tamagotchi.
I can see it now: Tomb Raider IV: PCS Edition, in glorious 120 by 150 monochrome. "Yes Lara, shake that little green ass! Jump! Shoot! Darn, I can't seem to find the Phallus of Kefru in this level..." Which reminds me, I wonder how many processor cycles have been spent rendering Lara's impressive cleavage since the first Tomb Raider came out. I think with that kind of processing power we could have cracked 128-bit Blowfish by now... ;-)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
Two killer portable ideas of mine, one easy, one hard:
- A rubberized, ruggedized, waterproof cell phone. Call it the "sport phone"; maybe make it bright yellow. Teenagers and outdoor workers need it; many others would buy it. Eliminate the need for a carrying case to protect the thing. Radios, cordless phones, and walkie-talkies are available like that, but for some reason, not cell phones.
- A phone in the form factor of a pen. That's a little beyond the state of the art, but it can't be that far away. Voice input, no buttons or screen. Suits would go for it.
Go for it, portable hardware types."...vastly powerful processors, that will render the need for "efficiency" as irrelevant as my 2gb hard drive..." My friend, the need for "efficiency" is, and always will be tantamount to the need for bigger, better, faster. Study a little about queuing theory and you will find that efficiency is far, far more important than massive parallellism. Take, for example, this question: "Which is better, a supermarket checkout clerk who checks out at speed 'n*2' items/minute, or two check out clerks that check out at 'n' items/minute?" Are they equivalent? As far as items/minute, yes. Chances are, the resources required for checkers 2 and 3 are more than required for checker 1. All I'm saying is: "THERE IS NO SUBSTITUTE FOR EFFICIENCY." I program with a guy that says, "You know, this code doesn't need to be efficient because we have a fast processor." Perhaps that's a valid argument for one instance, but ramp up ANY variable, such as ambient traffic or mulitple instances and you have a very real and feasible problem. Sure, you can buy a larger machine. Now you can theoretically process n*2 items. What happens as you start to approach 80% capacity of machine 2? The same thing that happened with machine 1. Now you need a machine 4x as powerful as machine 1 to process not 4n items, but (80% * 2n) * 2, or 3.2n. What would happen if you made the code running on machine 1 more efficient? Could you employ some software engineering ideals to squeeze some more performance out of machine 1? My experience says yes. I refactored my coworker's code and came out with a product that was around 18 times more effiecient than prior code. As far as "learning" goes, no knowledege is without merit. (Except maybe carnal... but that's different) If you have a need to learn it, learn it. If your constantly trying to increase your knowledge base so you can have more to contribute to your fellow man, learn it. I'm sorry for this little off-topic rant, but I have a real problem with an idea of "Innefficieny will be masked by technology." There is one context in which innefficiency is acceptable: prototypes.
This web-server is busy with 16 connections, 3 voice calls, 1 fax and 2 game consoles. Please try again after 5 minutes. Till then have a chance at Tetris at your own phone!
I think its pretty obvious already that WAP is not flying. Roll-out has happened all over Europe and hardly anyone is using it.
The main problems are high costs combined with unattractive design. Who wants to pay 20-50cts per minute for surfing in b/w text mode ?
The consumer magazines tested WAP extensively and most concluded that it is a mad proposition as it stands.
The operators have been extremely greedy when deciding on the pricing. After all the bandwidth which WAP uses is minimal compared to speech. A flat pricing like DoCoMos imode charges would have been appropriate.
The WAP setup is designed to give operators a leverage over the content. In theory most phones can change the operators default URL and point to some site which could provide you with a field which allows you to enter your real destination URL freely. But how many users are going to do that ? This leaves WAP content providers at the mercy of the operators portal. Not suprisingly the WAP content is extremely small.
Another drawback is that the display is too small to carry attractive adverts. 99% of the web's business models fall flat on the face because of this. Operators have not shown much ambition either to pass on some of their outragous charges to content providers.
I guess that WAP will eventually fly when i-mode arrives and the operators are forced to offer free WAP access.
I have a cell phone, like many of you. However I am not l33t and do not want to play Q3A:Pocket Edition on said cell phone. I also don't particularly care for surfing the net using crappy data protocols at slow speeds. Were I a developer I wouldn't appriciate Motorola and Nokia writing very different browsers for said cell phone which renders code for the competitor's product a garbled (waste of bandwidth == time == money == bankrupt) mess. Maybe I'm not with the "groove" as it were.
I don't want several things added to my cell phone but I can think of several things I DO want added to it. I want an electric ink screen rather than buttons and an LCD. There's a funny thing about devices that don't continuously need electricity, they preserve battery life a great deal. Electric ink in its various forms holds the image you put on it until another charge is applied to it and besides which the charge is meager compared to the backlight of an LCD. Such a screen compined with touch sensors could be altered to display any language easily and different keypads. Another thing I do want on a cell phone is a decent data rate that makes downloading of fancy XML dataforms quick and relatively painless. If we're going to WAP cell phones do we really need companies like Nokia and Motorola defining how we WAP our data (pun intended)? How about we use old skool HTML before Netscape and M$ extended it to be modernized sandskrit. Wow maybe we can even listen to those W3C guys talking about something called "HTML standards". It seems to me XML is not the greatest of ideas in some cases for limited bandwidth toys like cell phones and handheld computers. The main problem I see is bandwidth, with XML the processing is done almost entirely by your client machine. While this is fine and dandy on a four exahertz home system with a DSL hook-up a mobile device is somewhat limited by the battery and bandwidth which are both costing you money. People wouldn't be jizzing all over the internet right now if you had to pay by the house/minute/Planck second for access.
More to the point of this article why aren't we seeing more Java for these new and wonderful toys? According to McNealy a couple years ago by now we ought to be seeing Java everywhere. Networked phones seem like the perfect niche. JIT compiling and Applets let you write your WAP toy once and run it on any phone you get your hands on. Don't like Motorola's XML parser? Pop in a third party browser written in Java and you're good to go. Jini's marketing plans come back to me now, as do Bluetooth. I put my cell phone and laptop on a desk and turn both on and WAP! I have a wireless internet connection. Not only do I get to share my connection but I also get to upload a new program for the phone. Eh, oh well.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I really can't believe I'm reading this. 70-odd posts about WAP and hardly one of them is positive! I bet that not one of you remembers when HTML was something new. If you did, then perhaps you would recognise the importance of WML and WAP.
* Of course it's basic at the moment - it's a new standard. It's got a way to go before it develops, but it's already being used to produce useable and useful sites.
* OK, so its not Open Source - and Geoworks is kicking up a stink over an alleged patent they have on WAP, but nobody seriously believes Geoworks' claims and it is completely free to develop WAP - just the same as HTML.
* Phones have small screens and so WAP is text based. Yup. So what? There's a lot of info that can be made available through text - or don't you guys use telnet?
* WAP is insecure|slow|boring|expensive / there are too few sites / can't handle video/audio etc. Give it time. When I started using the net all the above was true as well. People invent and create around such obstacles.
* WML isn't as rich as HTML. Right tools for right interface. Do you need <font size="7"> on your phone? WML is a new markup language that resembles HTML, but is built using XML and includes the features that are necessary for the current development of phones.
* WML won't last. Quite possibly right. I kinda see WAP as a bridging technology to other better methods of accessing the huge amount of info that's on the net - however it's an extremely important bridging technology because for the first time, mobile Internet access is a reality - for the masses. It'll take a while to fill out and mature, but the cat is out of the bag and you ain't gonna be able to stuff it back in again.
Finally, I suspect that many of the posters here are Americans. Nope, I'm not going to get into some kinda racial slur here, but the US has a terrible relationship to mobile phone technology. Maybe if you lived in a country where mobile phone use was as cheap, simple and ubiquitous as those of us in Europe or Japan (and other areas), then you would understand how truly revolutionary it is being able to get access to a portion of the huge, huge wealth of information that is available on the Internet.
Beyond that, mobile phones are quite simply easier to understand and use for many people than computers. Even my Mum understands what WAP is about and uses an SMS banking service on her mobile phone. She's been on the web maybe 4 times! Does she really need a computer in her life? I think not - but if she had access to say, a theatre ticket booking system, her bank account balance and a simple message service she would actually make use of such tools.
Well, that's my rant over - if you've read this far I hope that you'll maybe reconsider your view of WAP - if not, that's your perogative and I'll look forward to hearing your views in 2 years when you are whining that you missed the boat.
Feel free to check out some of the WAP services already available here;
http://wapwarp.com
"Give the anarchist a cigarette"
A little planning goes a long way...
I went to a pretty interesting seminar in London a while back, which focused on the business case for WAP.
It seems (and there's quite a lot of support for this theory) that WAP is really just a temporary hack put there until they get 3G services sorted. I'm damn glad of this -- ever since I started working on WAP I've hated it. It seems such a badly-thought-out solution.
Guesses are that there just aren't going to be enough WAP-capable handsets in circulation before 3G takes off two years hence. Nokia and the others can't make them fast enough.
The networks, the manufacturers, the content providers, all seem to be paying lip-service to WAP while focusing on 3G and other technologies. This is a fair point.
Most developers I've spoken to say this, though: "It's not worth getting into WAP. Let's wait for 3G". However, I'll put this to you: WAP is an experiment. Not an experiment in technology (3G tech is so different that WAP techie experience will be useless). It's an experiment in business models. How will we make money out of "m-Commerce" and "free" wireless services? How do people interact with wireless services? What are going to be the primary uses of wireless services?
We have all these great ideas like revenue sharing and loss-leading (based on building a membership base across mobile and traditional internet platforms). Do we know whether they're going to work? The best thing to do is dip our toes in the water while they're getting 3G ready. Once that comes, WAP will probably go the way of Gopher.
For now, the companies who pass over WAP for 3G will enter the arena of wireless internet with NO EXPERIENCE, and NO ESTABLISHED BRAND within the wireless domain.
Okay, I'm talking fluent Suit now. I run an internet games business and I'm also the main developer. I have to see both sides of the coin. Even so, I'm dreading having to write games for WAP.
Tally me up for a 'WAP really sucks' vote, though.
Yawn. What a disappointment. Here I wanted to see how quickly I could port my 3D "tetris" game to a cell phone and I have to wait another four months. This is a good reminder of how poor the quality of Slashdot information and Slashdot community information is. Well, here's one member of the community trying to get the facts I've learned out. We'll see if you moderators cooperate. :-) (Is my criticism of Slashdot too insightful for you? Oh, sorry, I'm not supposed to mention the invisible moderators in a plea for points, either overt or reverse- sychologically, right?)
Sarcastically yours,
--LP
Damn straight. And the bizarre thing is, these is a WAP equivalent that does not suck: NTT Docomo's i-mode. Unfortunately, it's a proprietary PDC (Japan-only) system and so it will never be seen elsewhere, but it has managed to avoid the key mistakes which are likely to doom WAP to oblivion.
- Mistake 1: WAP phones do not allow access to the Internet (yes, I know about gateways and such, but they're a hack). i-mode phones do. Result: right off the bat the i-mode can access a lot more content.
- Mistake 2: WAP is so overpriced it's not even funny. Here in Finland, which usually has very low prices for cellular use, a single WAP call can easily cost several dollars -- compare this with less than 10c for an SMS or a one-minute call. In Japan, i-mode costs a low fixed monthly fee and e.g. e-mail costs one yen (approx. 1c) a pop.
- Mistake 3: WAP phones are normal phones with teensy screens. i-mode phones have huge displays, the never models even have color screen. Usability is much better.
i-mode looks set to have 10 million subscribers by the end of the year. In Finland I don't know a soul who actually uses WAP, and I work at a company that develops WAP applications! Like most people here, I'll wait until UMTS is rolled out before buying my next phone, WAP simply does not provide any incentive to upgrade now.Cheers,
-j.
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Drag n' Drop DVD Recommendations
I just wanted to point out that Ericsson also has tools like this avalible. I don't know how they compair, but they can be found here. http://www.ericsson.com/developerzone
Sorry, but to incite developers to use WAP it takes more than a free dev. kit, I think.
t entProblem/one/index.html
http://www.freeprotocols.org/wapTrap/WapShortPa
WAP is simply not an open standard. We already have a technology for such applications, whjich is proven, open and runs pretty well : HTTP.
-- javaDragon is an instance of JavaDragon.
Well, it isn't completely new, it's a dialect of XML.
My prediction is that we are going to Moore's Law WAP to death in short order ("I'd like 'The Patently Obvious' for $400, Alex")
The limiting factors for WAP devices by and large aren't processor power, so Moore's law doesn't apply. The two major factors are screen size and network speed.
The only guideline I know for network speed is Neilsen's Law, which is significantly slower than Moore's, and that only covers Internet bandwidth, not Wireless bandwidth. And screen size is fixed. If you don't think that calls for a different UI, try posting to /. off a cell phone.
*'castle with flying bats' card pack not included.
Let it be known that I have no arguments against Asteroids or Missle Command. I would accept that.
"It's the little touches that make a future solid enough to be destroyed" --William S. Bourroughs
As someone who has implemented a medium-scale WAP application, I have only one thing to say: WAP sucks.
:/
The fact that its based on XML is cool, the syntax is clear, the addition of a scripting language is fairly sensible, and yet I have many gripes:
Motorola and Nokia have implemented their browsers completely differently, you simply cannot write a simple WAP application that will perform well and be userfriendly on both, you have to do it twice, once for each browser basically.
Additionally, the WAP markup itself is full of redundencies, there are invariably several ways to achieve each effect. This would be fine except that each browser implementation treats them differently, causing something that is easily navigable in one browser to be a total mess in another.
This on top of the already obvious flaws such as over-zealous caching despite headers, terrible error handling, buggy simulators (Nokia in particular) and confusingly unintuitive choices for various aspects make WAP at its current stage impractical to develop in with anything short of a Motorola and Nokia phone right in front of you to test with.
I note however that if you can get your hands on a couple of phones to test with, things become easier, and with a bit of wire sniffing and using a decent backend language like PHP, you can whip up WAP applications fairly quickly. Its just not a small-time developers game at this stage
You can't win a fight.
I've been trying to read a bit about WAP at the WAP forum and the W3C but the whole thing strikes me as semi-interim and only half heartedly standard and open.
My basic complaint is the premise. On the one hand we see a whole new type of device with legions of people trying to figure out how to make efficient GUIs while conserving either display space, or storage, or whatnot with WAP ...and on the other hand we have multi-zillion dollar companies building infrastructure and vastly powerful processors, that will render the need for "efficiency" as irrelevant as my 2gb hard drive.
My prediction is that we are going to Moore's Law WAP to death in short order ("I'd like 'The Patently Obvious' for $400, Alex")