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WAP vs. iMode - The Big Cell Fight
har124 writes: "With DoCoMo's decision to take its i-Mode phones, which are hugely popular in Japan, to the U.S. and Europe, the big fight between i-Mode and WAP seems to have begun. Who'll emerge from this bloody brawl? Check out the discussion."
1) The WAP protocol itself, with focus on the Wireless Markup Language
WAP is not a bad protocol, and I would add that it is a rather good protocol that meets the goals it was developed for:
- Limited Bandwidth
- Limited Screen Real Estate
The wireless markup language offers great flexibility to interface with phones with limited capabilities. I've been working with it ever since its creation and thru its (at times) painful evolution. Interacting with a phone is quite different from interacting with a desktop computer and a mouse, a lot of out-of-the-box thinking had to be put into the development of this markup language, how to go from one screen to another, how to loop thru all the links within a screen, the concepts of DECKS and CARDS that let you minimize useless downloads of information and optimize navigation, the various ways to send data to a server through different input mechanisms, user-input validation to minimize errors and downloads. If thoroughly thought-out, a wireless web application working with the WAP protocol can be a very useful tool for every day life.2) Why WAP phones? Why do less?
I personally, currently don't *need* to be surfing the whole entire web on my phone. Not right now. With work and personnal research I do from home and at my office, I already spend all the time I need using the Internet to its full potential. And I'd much rather like to be sitting comfortably in a chair at a desktop computer while I do all that.
When I'm on the move and/or going out with friends, I don't necessarily want to have a full-featured computer in the palm of my hand. Not worth the money, not worth the weight nor the size of an i-mode (I bought the Motorolla StarTAC for its compact size). I know it's tempting, I'm all for snazzy gadgets, I do have quite a few, but frankly, I don't need it right now.
However, I'd often be hanging out with friends and suddenly one of us would ask: "I wonder what's playing at the theaters located near the Derby, Hollywood, anyone up for a movie before going out dancing?". I get out my StarTAC Sprint PCS phone, connect, go straight to the wireless interface of my yahoo, go to movies, key in a zipcode, get a list of theaters in that area, pick one, see movies playing, pick one to get the times, and boom!: In a matter of a few seconds I get all the information I need. How's my EarthLink stock doing today? same thing -> my yahoo, stocks, select ELNK (which was part of my list of the portfolio I had set-up), see stocks details.
- The nice thing about WAP phones is that they don't allow SPAM!
- no ad banners
- no useless images
- clear, simple and well presented information: when you have such limited screen real-estate and bandwith, it FORCES web applications developers and interface designers to put a MUCH stronger emphasis on USABILITY, which a lot of web sites currently lack.
The above are my usual replies to the obvious question "why do less when you can do more?" Hopefuly, with much-needed healthy i-mode competition arising, the price of WAP phones and services will go down. There might still be a market for those phones catering to more low-end users, people like me maybe. I would expect i-modes to be a raging success among teens, who as everyone know, will LOVE to be connected ALL THE TIME and do all kinds of entertaining stuff on their gadget. i-mode also seems a much cheaper alternative to computers + internet connection. Some other people already get enough connectivity at work and at home and don't need additional entertainment on that but wouldn't mind a phone that gives them the option to look-up some very topical information every once in a while.3) The Real Issues / Why so much hate?
A lot of i-mode's hype among developers comes from the fact that "it does HTML!". Hurray, that means developers don't have to re-think nor re-do any of their site to cater to i-modes! Hey, being a developer myself and having dealt with quite a lot of markup languages I'm all for that too. Then I can't help but wonder: What would http://www.wired.com/, http://www.slashdot.org/, http://my.yahoo.com/ look like on an i-mode? How nicely do framesets render? What about ad banners? Does it handle complex nested tables? Then I read "well you should optimize your site to deliver 'compact HTML' or cHTML". Ok, now that makes a little more sense. You do need to rethink your site a little. At least you don't have to learn that very complex new markup language called WML, you might "waste" a whole half day of your life learning it. And the interface and site flow can pretty much remain the same! All valid reasons ...
b) Diagnosis ...
But I believe there is a much deeper issue that lurks around the corner when I look at the strong resistance from so many people to WML.
-> Change <-
A lot of people praise the i-mode because it is closer to already existing standards like HTML, thereby solving implementation nightmares. People will one day have to face the fact that HTML *might not* be THE answer to all web applications. Who knows what task-specific web-enabled devices will come out in the next few years? One can't guarantee HTML will the the appropriate markup language for all of them. I personally don't think i-mode and WAP phones are ready to compete on the exact same level because they don't necessarily serve the same purposes nor markets, yet I keep seeing people writing big controversies about "WAP vs i-mode". Over the last 5 years, a good part of the Internet community has learned to live with a now well-defined "vision" of the "The Web", with a well-defined set of protocols that are known and understood by all developers, and in the last year, with the demise of WAP, it has become a more popular belief that any "web-enabled" device should fit within that same original vision.
c) Solutions ... ?
People and developers will have to learn to live with the fact that new standards SHOULD and WILL arise, and that it's the only way we can build stronger, more user-oriented web applications. If we don't explore all options that are currently out there, how can we certify that our current standards are the best? "The Web" will evolve to serve a wider array of purposes, and it is not unreasonable to think that some of those purposes should be part of different protocols and infrastructures custom-built from the ground-up.
Extraordinary Vacations. Exceptional Prices
Not to detract from your attempt at fearcasting ...
It's "forecasting". There's no such word as "fearcasting".
When it's not an informed decision, but instead an amalgamation of fifty different people's opinions, none of whom really know what's going on in your situation. This merely means that rather than going with what you would normally do, you're ending up with a kind of "lowest common denominator" decision.
If mobile phones had been around three hundred years ago, do you think America would be independant today? I think not.
RealVision will be releasing an add-on for the Palm V so you can use it as a phone on GSM cell networks.
"The communications snap-on product will provide dual-band GSM (Global System for Mobile communication) connectivity to Palm V series handhelds, and an earphone jack to enable voice communications through a headset. The product is expected to be available in early 2001 for less than U.S. $299 when purchased in conjunction with a 1-year wireless service plan."
The 'sled' will also send and receive data which they say "will allow those users to access a wide range of Internet content..." Nothing on whether it will support WAP or i-mode, though there is an inference that it may support the Palm VII "web-clipping" applications.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
This has nothing to do with WAP, but with PDC vs. GSM. When we have GPRS for GSM, we get higher data speeds for any data application, including WAP. If you would try to do I-Mode over GSM, you would get a similar speed, or perhaps even worse, since in WAP the data is somewhat compressed (I don't know whether I-Mode compresses over the air-link).
3. When WAP decided to come out, it thought, hell, we don't need no stinking http protocol, we will invent our own called WAP. yeah, great idea guys, did you forget to mention that you are re-inventing the wheel here or were we supposed to see something great and new. Basically they made a system where the phone contacts the provider which has a server, the server goes out to the site that they want and looks for WML files, the server crunches them and then sends them back to the phone. (at least, that is the way that it is supposed to work, I haven't had anyone prove that it works yet) This is really great, so this is basically a proxy server going to a web server and delivering a page that they can see on thier phone. Why not just use the TCP/IP and go hit a web page designed for a phone. If a server is set up correctly and the programmer has a clue, they will do some client checking and send the phones to a greatly stripped down page were all they see is the text, nothing fancy.
First you complain about the speed, then you want plain HTTP over TCP/IP! WAP was not just for the fun of getting a new standard, but especially designed so that it would at least be a little faster than sending uncompressed HTML over a data link (air link).
Since WAP also includes terminal capability negotiation, the phone can tell the net that it cannot receive pictures, and then the WAP gateway will not send them. There are many such tricks that make WAP/WML much more suitable for browsing on small screens with varying capabilities than HTML is.
I think that UMTS will solve most of the problems that people have with WAP, since these problems are caused by the data speed available in GSM. WAP (especially WML) can be used for UMTS as well as for GSM, except that you replace the lower protocol layers.
Since almost all mayor phone manufacturers support WAP, I do not think that I-Mode will have success in Europe. The underlying protocol layers that make I-Mode attractive (including always-on) are not supported by current mobile (GSM) networks in Europe, and will not be available until we get UMTS.
I agree that WAP is just an intermediate phase, because we have low data rates and really small screens. As soon as we get really cheap and light head-mounted displays and UMTS, there is no need for WAP anymore. But I-Mode will become obsolete at that time as well!
*Truusje
That said, I had some problems with the article.
First, the article states that WAP is targeted at premium users, but WAP access is really cheap. At least where I am. Verizon (c.f. worst possible choice) gives me WAP access for 4.95 / month additional to my normal rate and the phone only cost $30. Now I did have to sign the next 12 months of my life away, but that's Verizon for you.
Second, i_Mode's packet switching, always on, may be wonderful, but the best part of WAP is it works with existing networks. Verizon did not upgrade their network, they just added WAP servers. Much more attractive on a price level - for both consumer and provider.
Third, WAP is designed for low bandwidth cell phone use, but there's no reason why it can't scale to greater bandwidth or processing power. It has limits, but they haven't been reached.
That said, don't let this post sound like an endorsement of WAP or (good, God!) Verizon. The WAP consortium, or whatever, has developed a proprietary and abusive standards process and Verizon only occasionally gets my bill correct, not to mention the www.myvzw.com site blows chunks. WML isn't pretty and the implementations are worse. But it's here now and it's cheap.
That's why the web exploded in the first place. No one thought Netscrape was great, but it worked. No one thought dialup (or AOL) was great, but it worked, and people used it. Then better faster, cheaper solutions came along. The same will happen with wireless web.
It seems like there is a lot of confusion as to what WAP really is. WAP is a protocol....so all you guys who think WAP only works on circuit-switched networks are wrong. WAP will run on circuit or packet switched networks....just because the current implementation of GSM only supports WAP on circuit-switched networks, doesn't mean WAP wont work on a packet-switched network. Infact, in the US, Nextel already has WAP on a packet-switched network. All that is needed for WAP to be supported on a packet-switched network is a RF channel for packet data and a some sort of data gatway that will do all the packet switching between the phone and the internet.
Right now, speculation of "who is better than who" will be overshadowed by "who has released the software/hardware/network to utilise it". I don't care if i-Mode is superiour to WAP if WAP becomes released first and gains significant marketshare. As a (very lazy) web developer, I'm going to concentrate on the 20% of technology that will allow me to reach 80% of the people, and not the other way around.
Though, I've seen (and used) iMode phones in Tokyo. They're slick, but then, will NTT be able to ram i-Mode through the international standardisation so that I can take an i-Mode phone (almost) anywhere? Will the current international mobile nightmare finally end?
--
The rise of the mobile phone has given momentum to the idea that people can be permanently connected via a web of communication, day or night, 365 days a year. And now with services like WAP/iMode, they can not only be connected with each other, they can be connected with the vast amount of data found online.
Does anyone else see the dangerous parallels between this and the actions of a hive mind? People are becoming less autonomous, more used to communicating their plans and ideas with others and receiving feedback before acting. Rather than allowing us to share information, mobile phones are acting as mechanisms which dampen individual creativity and instead encourage people to conform to the hive.
And with the advent of WAP/iMode, this trend is only getting worse. Why think for yourself when a premade answer is only a few button presses away? Sooner or later people will learn to stop thinking at all, for they will be connected to a grid in which everybody else can do their thinking for them. And rather than the wonderful quantities which make us unique, we'll all be drones, revelling in our powers of "communication".
No thanks, leave me out of this "revolution" in communication.
That I actually start longing for a monopoly. For infrastructure as important as wireless I can't stand seeing twenty friggin' towers and yet not a one is for my particular cell phone cause I can't find a signal.
Monopoly...wireless everywhere...then deregulation. That's the ticket.
1) The connection speed is way too slow and flaky. A friend of me has tried to get a WAP portal going, Talkfolio, apparently your web experience is greatly limited by bandwidth - kind of like watching TV in black and white.
2) Acceptance - very few major websites out there have a "WAP Option"
3) WAP devices _suck_. It's like trying to look at the internet through a keyhole. What the killer appliance IMHO in this instance is a gameboy, palmpilot and mobile phone all rolled into one. That way you get a decent screen, your connection, and pluggability so you can put a folding keyboard on it, or use graffiti. The lack of a mouse device and keyboards on WAP phones just cripples the device. Cool toy, but I can already receive and send email on my mobile easily. If you want me to have mobile web, it's got to be easy to use.
I think people are expecting too much from WAP at the minute; it's been overhyped and people are expecting a full on internet experience, which it just isn't.
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
... you'll just stand back and wait for the winner to emerge. Don't end up being Betamax man, even if it is the better technology... ;)
Look, this isn't about WML vs c-HTML or some other matter of arcane standards preference. It's about circuit-switiched vs packet-switched. Which is like the difference between a batch-mode mainframe and an interactive PC. Or DSL vs a dial-up modem. It's no contest which is going to be the most popular with consumers and the most effective overall. It's the persistance of the connection that makes all the difference, not the data standard.
WAP is just a kludge to make the most out of our terrible circuit-switched wireless infrastructure. If we had widespread packet-based networks that could handle voice *and* data (ie, not Metricom, et al) we wouldn't be having this discussion.
But we don't have those networks. And if the FCC doesn't get it's act together and kick the UHF channels of the spectrum, we won't for years to come.
Another difference is in the markup languages the two use, i-Mode uses c-HTML which is a subset of HTML while WAP uses WML which is a subset of XML. Although c-HTML is similar to HTML and easier for Web designers to use, XML is considered to be the Internet language of the future as HTML has limited capabilities.
Hmmm. /. story)
WML is not a sub-set of XML, it is an implmentation of XML. I think the idea of using XHTML instead of a totally new XML dialect (WML) is a good one. (recent
The replacement for HTML may one day be XHTML, but not pure XML. XML needs some form of implementation to make it work. --
DWR is Ajax for Java
Cooperation is a better answer than monopolies.
Take cash machines. I want to be able to use all cash machines. Solution one is having one bank so all cash machines are run by the same company. Solution two is all banks co-operate (like the link network in the UK) now I can use virtually all cash machines but there's still competition between banks.
I suppose mobile operators should co-operate and take calls from others networks when they're the only one avaliable.
Palm VII and its cousins are a much better choice for "wireless web" (or wireless whatever) than phones. The larger screen and pen input are much more useful and user-friendly.
sulli
sulli
RTFJ.
Agreed, WML got hyped way out of proportion, but at the same time, what people don't understand is that cHTML and i-Mode has a unique position in that it was created in a monopolized vaccuum where most of the users don't have landline connections and there is only one telco and that's owned by the government. WAP was able to bridge lots of hurdles, from different governments to different standards.
XHTML 1.0 will make it much easier to create wireless services, plus will have the ability to support all of the images, sounds, movies, etc. that we've been hyped to expect.
for more info on the WAP 2.0 and XHTML 1.0 announcement, go here...
http://www.infowo rld.com/articles/hn/xml/00/09/14/000914hnwap.xml
"The next major version of WAP, a protocol for providing Internet-based data services on mobile phones, will complete a migration to XHTML (Extensible Hypertext Markup Language) and TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) as the foundation of the technology, which will make it easier for developers to write WAP applications, said Michael Short, director of international affairs and strategy at BTCellnet, in Slough, England, and a member of the WAP Forum board of directors."
"The group, which has more than 580 member companies and hosted about 700 delegates here, is also making progress toward enabling additional services on WAP devices, according to Scott Goldman, chief executive officer of the WAP Forum. In addition to animation, streaming media, and music downloads, WAP will display color graphics, provide location-specific content, and allow users to synchronize information with personal information manager software on a desktop PC in a remote location."
WAP just isn't for me, as it brings back the pay-per-online-time horror which I am so happy I could leave behind(cable-modem rules!)
And then consider it's much higher cost, and lower speed than your normal modem.
I think i-Mode's packet switched, always online network with a pre-determined price per month sounds much more attractive. And then I'm not even talking about the extra graphics possibilities!
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
The main reason for this is the kind of network the two use; WAP uses circuit switched network while i-Mode uses packet switched data network, which is more suited to transferring data than circuit switched networks. Also, the packet based network contributes to the ?always on? nature of the i-Mode
I can't believe WAP uses real circuit switched networks! This has to be a misunderstanding of this author. I don't know the details of WAP, but can anyone confirm that it doesn't use circuit switched networks? Perhaps the author misinterpreted something.. perhaps WAP phones make a dedicated connection to a WAP server for a certain amount of time, and the author interpreted that as circuit switched. Any know know any details?
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
Sun has just "announced" J2ME (Java 2 Micro Edition), which they of course hope will be the next standard.
The standard is called the mobile information device profile (MIDP) and will be in mobile phones from Motorola, Nokia, LG Electronics, Nextel and NTT DoCoMo.
Story on java.sun.com.
Story on News.com
Apparently the DoCoMo is the latest craze in Japan. Fortune magazine reports that the number of DoCoMo phones is growing by 50,000 a day! It's especially popular with teenagers, who use them to participate in chat rooms. Do Japanese technofads tend to spread here?
--meredith
--meredith
Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis
Once you're part of that group you're going to get listed on the DoCoMo portal interface on the imode phone and you'll see your traffic multiply by 50 - 60 times (according to a speaker from m.Ogilvy, Japan, at a recent talk I went to at BAFTA in London).
DoCoMo reckon that they will have 21 million users by the end of 2000, that's more than the number of people online in Japan via PC. Effectively the mobile phone becomes the primary point of internet access for more people than the desktop computer.
So even if the medium is crap, it will have superceded the computer in Japan... better take these people seriously...
I work for an internet company and we are currently working on a project to make our site WAP enabled. WHy are we using WAP, cause we have to. If we had a choice we would use I-Mode for several reasons.
1. WAP really isn't documented anywhere of what acutally works and what doesn't. Not to mention that every phone maker out there is using something different, It isn't really WAP, it is the bastard first child of what will become WAP in the next 6 months. There is limited support for full form functionality. And the emulators don't work consistently, thus, the phones don't work consistently, get my drift. For the Mr Rodger's neighborhood people," Can you say Cluster F*CK!"
2. Speed burns baby! WAP, at best can handle 9600. Whoo! now that is a screaming technology. But that is what it was built for, recieving text, not graphics, not games, text. I-mode however has been built for speed. In Japan they are playing network games over these things.
3. When WAP decided to come out, it thought, hell, we don't need no stinking http protocol, we will invent our own called WAP. yeah, great idea guys, did you forget to mention that you are re-inventing the wheel here or were we supposed to see something great and new. Basically they made a system where the phone contacts the provider which has a server, the server goes out to the site that they want and looks for WML files, the server crunches them and then sends them back to the phone. (at least, that is the way that it is supposed to work, I haven't had anyone prove that it works yet) This is really great, so this is basically a proxy server going to a web server and delivering a page that they can see on thier phone. Why not just use the TCP/IP and go hit a web page designed for a phone. If a server is set up correctly and the programmer has a clue, they will do some client checking and send the phones to a greatly stripped down page were all they see is the text, nothing fancy.
The japanese have thier stuff together, the question is, are we going to open our eyes and see it or are we going to get stomped in electronics.....again!