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Mobile Phone Industry to Scrap WAP
joestump98 writes: "According to this story at Yahoo the industry has started an initiative to introduce "The Mobile Services Initiative (M-Series)" which aims to be an open software and hardware standard. The article goes so far to call WAP a "fiasco." The new M-Series is set to offer faster GPRS networks to offer consistent, high-quality mobile Internet."
This is a good first step, but the future hinges on whether GPRS will deliver ISDN-like performance in general purpose Web access, or whether, due to crufty handsets or crufty network engineering, it will be, essentially, WAP+. GPRS has the potential to be pretty good always-on Internet at reasonable prices. It is is built out that way, it will be very successful.
I wrote parts of this stuff
Right, and it'll be using WAP over GPRS. Maybe not WML though - WAP doesn't rule out other formats. DoCoMo is exporting the i-mode brand, or maybe only their experience in marketing and ensuring usability, rather than any technology.
WAP can be used on top of IP. WAP phones on the GSM system normally make a circuit-switched GSM data connection and run PPP and UDP/IP on top of that. The WAP-specific protocols then sit on top of UDP. GPRS, the "2.5G" high-speed packet system for GSM supports IP directly, so WAP-GPRS phones also use UDP/IP. UMTS, which is the 3G version of GSM, will assign an IPv6 to each handset and use IPv6 for everything, including voice calls.
Nope, caller pays also in Scandinavia. What's more, some subscription schemes (like mine, a phone card actually) even give you a bonus if someone calls you! Yes, people have already started to abuse this by going into someones office, calling your own phone and not hang up.
Lars
__
Reality or nothing.
You can run Lynx on a 386SX with an 80x25 display. A mobile phone has an even worse display, but processing power shouldn't be a problem.
Okay, not every site is viewable in Lynx, but giving access to (say) 50% of the web is a big improvement over the 0.0001% or whatever that's available in WML. And converting existing content to lean HTML will probably be easier than converting it to WML.
And 9.6kb/s is easily fast enough for web browsing, if it is with gzip compression (which in practice seems to double or triple downloading speed) and without pictures. Just how many bytes are needed to give a screenful of text on a mobile? All that's required is for the phone company to set up a proxy server that can talk 'Accept-encoding: gzip' with the phones (I think) - and more and more web servers have this as standard anyway.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
No, all I meant was use plain HTML, but use lossless compression while sending it over the network. Having a separate format like WAP is a waste of time if all the content in it is just automatically translated from HTML to start with. Might as well just send the HTML.
Byte-compiling is a good idea, but it should be more general. I've often wished for a 'compiler' which knows about the DTD you're using and can encode tags in (probably) one byte plus attributes and content.
In fact, a compression program which knows about grammars - whether XML/SGML DTDs or Lex/Yacc rules - would be most handy. You could probably get pretty good compression on C source code if you parsed it into a syntax tree and compressed that. If only two alternatives, FOO and BAR, are possible at a given point in the syntax tree, then whichever is used can be encoded in just one bit (although you might prefer to byte-align the output). Identifier names could be stored as numbers referencing the built-up syntax table. Then run the output through gzip to deal with literal text strings and to get some extra compression. This would almost certainly give better results than just using a compressor which makes no assumptions about file format.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
He's right, you know. The problem is that a single provider, say Vodaphone, for instance, must route all their WAP traffic through a single WAP gateway. This results in scalability problems. It's inherent to WAP. WAP could never scale, and as a result, WAP sucks.
As far as all the protocols are concerned, they're really not that hard to pick up. And the imode stuff is doing it again, although this time they're sticking a little closer to existing protocols. The protocols aren't that bad, though. It's really the problems inherent with the stupid gateway that Nokia had offered up when WAP was invented.
Why did they do it? Well, Nokia wanted to have control over the process. Control==capability to bill more for it separately==more money. It was a stupid decision. But, alas, stupid decisions are often made by industry leaders trying to extend their dominance to another market.
--Be human.
Our mobile phones have the same area code as our local numbers. We don't have separate area codes for mobile phones. Thus, billing (and educating the consumer that they're calling a mobile phone and not a land line) becomes exceedingly difficult.
Woah. Your statement about the Americans & Europeans is quite a broad statement. I think you misunderstand the politics behind the US mobile market. Our fucked up system is the result of a system that came *after* GSM. Yes, our digital systems were developed after GSM. Motorola lobbied Congress hard for the US to adopt their proprietary system so that they would have a lock on handset sales (Nokia still won out in the end). Since Motorola is a *big* defense contractor, and since the US was trying to protect the strategically important defense contractors from going belly up in a market of enormous cuts in defense spending, the government adopted Motorola's specs. It's pure politics, which are as fucked up in the US as they are anywhere.
As for "just about every standard", I hope you're talking about phones. I can recite dozens of superious US proprietary standards in areas other than phones. With phones, however, I'll concede your point.
BTW, WAP was designed by Nokia. In Finland.
--Be human.
It's a result of free local calls for land-line connections. In the US, local calls are entirely free. As a result, the phone companies had no infrastructure to bill for local calls to mobile phones. As a result, in order for the mobile phone operators to make money, they had to bill the receiver rather than the caller.
This is the single biggest reason why mobile phone usage in the US is far lower than in Europe, as a percentage of the total market. In fact, mobile phone usage in the US is even lower than many developing nations. Of course, it's also the single biggest reason why Internet usage in the US is far higher than every other nation. Free local calls results in no incremental costs for Internet usage, which in turn leads to people surfing for pr0n for hours on end.
It may seem stupid when it comes to mobile phones, but it also has its strong points in other areas.
--Be human.
Good point about the need for email - one of the biggest gaps in WAP is that you can't send a WAP page to someone via SMS so that the links work from their SMS view on the phone.
Wireless is not just about low bandwidth - it's about highly variable bandwidth, high error rates, and latency sometimes measured in seconds.
Here are some of the things that TCP in particular has trouble with:
* Poor radio conditions lead to increased error correction (GPRS changes coding schemes on the fly) and re-transmissions (typically, 50% of all ethernet-sized packets are retransmitted because the basic medium is quite liable to corruption). Typical frame error rates are 1 to 2%, and errors tend to happen in bursts.
* Competition from voice calls or other data traffic in a cell, and lack of dedicated per-cell bandwidth (timeslots) for data traffic, lead to huge variations in bandwidth available.
The impact on TCP is that it frequently goes into slow start (because a whole series of packets is dropped by burst errors - TCP-Reno, the commonest implementation these days, is very sensitive to this). This means you go back to sending only one packet at a time (window size of one), then double the window size each ACK round-trip-time, until you get to half of your previous window size, when you start increasing linearly.
There is a lot of work going on to optimise TCP for wireless, following on from earlier work that optimised it for long fat pipes (e.g. SACK and window scaling). See http://www.aciri.org/floyd/tcp_small.html for a good survey. The key point is that wireless TCP performance has very little to do with TCP's behaviour on a link that has a constant 2400 bps bandwidth, a constant latency, and probably lower frame error rates.
It would have been better if the WAP people had just improved TCP, or created TCP gateways to the outside world, but plain unmodified TCP is not very usable in wireless. Apart from TCP, most of the WAP protocols could have been avoided, and certain WML was a mistake, but reduction of header overheads (IP, TCP and HTTP) and page sizes is important, so this would have had to be done on top of IP somehow. NTT DoCoMo's i-mode does prove that this is possible, though the technical details are not clear beyond their use of cHTML.
The real issue with WAP is terrible usability and poor implementations of browsers, WAP gateways, WAP servers and WML content - e.g. the Back button is dependent on the site coding it into WML, so sometimes you just can't go back, and frequently you get 'No gateway response' on trying a new site.
Also, it's very hard to report problems to WAP sites since they are not smart enough to include an SMS number where you could send them a report (and the problem could be anywhere between browser and site, in any case).
http://www.gsmworld.com/news/press_2001/press_rele ases_24.html
Firstly, M-Services (not M-Series, as mentioned in the submission) "could include enhanced graphics, music, video, games, ring tones, screen savers and other compelling services" (from the link). Note this is nothing to do with browsing content on the Internet.
Secondly, another quote from the article: "M-Services will leverage other key standardisation efforts like WAP, EMS, MMS and SyncML to bring a consistent user experience for digital content." says Jan Wäreby, CEO, Ericsson Consumer Division
To make an (admittedly poor) analogy, whilst WAP is like Web browsing, M-Services will be like Flash animation.
And anyway, the "failure" of WAP was clearly not due to poor download speeds, inability to use phones for browsing, or problems with using new protocols in mobile phone networks, as had already been claimed in this Slashdot thread. All of these factors are present in Japan, and despite this there is the success of NTT DoCoMo's iMode service, J-Phone's J-sky, or the TU-KA EZweb with in total 37 million users (See the stats at http://www.tca.or.jp/index-e.html)
Andrew Scott
I spent a lot of time playing with WAP. My company decided to support WAP mostly just because of all the hype around it, not because it was good technology. WAP sucked for a lot of reasons:
Given all that, I think the Internet will always be on phones in one form or another. Phones browsers will never be Internet Explorer, but phones now have sufficient CPUs and memory. Coming soon are beautiful color displays and bandwidth. With all of this, good ol' HTTP/TCP/IP will work fine as a protocol (Your mobile provider will pick Layer 2 for you). No need for a special protocol like WAP, instead Webmasters will key off of USER_AGENT and render differently for phones. Its that simple.
WAP can be transported over SMS - but i've never seen or heard of anyone actually crazy enough to try this.
WAP is more commonly the application layer over a PPP connection. For example, enter any ISP's dial-in number into your phone's WAP settings (+ username and password) along with the IP address of a publicly accessible WAP gateway and you're away laughing.
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Rare Window - free your photos
While I'm not a big fan of WAP, this article is just plain wrong. I read this from "The Feature", quoting an "Industry Standard" article describing the M-Services guidelines:
"For instance, the guidelines call for phones to be compliant with WAP 1.2 this year and, looking into next year, the next generation of M-Services phones should be compatible with WAP 2.0."
Remember what WAP 2.0 is? The markup language used is no longer WML but XHTML. If that's not standard enough for you, I don't know what is!
(I'm not the tech -- and especially not the wireless web tech -- at this company; and as usual I'm speaking only for myself, but I have "some experience.")
:)
We need a bill-presentment mechanism for the wireless web. I can do an e-gold spend on a mobile phone, but it's a pain in the ass, because there's no way for a merchant to send my phone a short e-mail with a URL that includes the target account number and the requested quantity of e-gold (in whatever units, but ultimately for us everything's grams) to spend (or not). Once my phone gets that mail with the URL, I should be asked whether I want to go from email to the wireless web (yes, otherwise auto-delete the mail) and if I log in correctly I should be previewing a spend on the next screen so all I have to do is click "confirm" if I actually want to pay.
Unfortunately, the telephone companies (see the vaunted, moneylosing "G3") are much better at wasting gobs of money than they are at taking advantage of something useful if they don't own 100% of it. (And frankly, I would NOT trust any phone company to do a currency right, they're too clueless and insecure IMO.) Right now, I should be able to pay my damn phone bill with my phone (even without e-mail bill-presentment) and http://pcs.e-gold.com SHOULD be an easy to find URL on ALL wireless-web enabled phones (IMO, flame me for my constant-greed if you want, but e-gold is one of the only actually-useful things I've found on that tiny, crappy interface).
Phone companies have resisted all attempts at a clue-implant for what-works-now, and instead they singlemindedly focus on wasting their stockholders' loot at an even faster rate than moronic late-'90s dot.coms did! (See "G3" again.) Whatever these huge companies do, we'll keep chugging along and adapt. I like the wireless web, and I'd like it to be more-useful, but I don't need it. I could rant-on, but I won't.
JMR
Try e-gold - (contact me). I'm NOT e-
For everybody who thinks WAP sucks or is dead, then you haven't really seen what can be done on WAP. You've probably seen just the crappy shit that most mobile companies put out as WAP services. Want to see the future of WAP as a media platform?? Check out this WAP service:
http://wap.movingentertainment.com/hosted/flipmick /demo/
Yep, comics anytime anywhere you want including archives for missed episodes. Let a newspaper and even a fixed Net try that! OH yeah, and you don't get black ink on the fingers when you read it!
- Raynet --> .
Some people blame faults in TCP/IP for the creation of WAP. However, IPv6 is already being deploted, and explicitly solves mobility problems. Since IPv4-over-IPv6 is a given, and since IPv6 will likely be the dominant protocol within a few years, I think it would be wise to go with an IPv6-based solution.
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Why oh why must another so called standard be introduced when no one has gotten the first ones correct to begin with?
I take newer introductions to broken technology as a marketing gimmick to have people forget the problems that no one ever fixed. RADIUS is the standard no make that DIAMETER, yes DIAMETER is the standard... Give me a break. Why don't they take the time to get it right to begin with then focus on improving from there instead of overhyping the so called next best thing which will likely follow suit.
Look I don't want to sound trollish and I hope I don't but think about it for a second, will redoing the whole thing make things better when they could intergrate into what's already available? It would make more sense to go on and spend an enormous amount of time and money to create something completely from scratch, thinking it will be the norm (which in technology is a joke), only to have something marketed a few months down the road as that months next best thing.
Aside from that, more counties/countries are slowly realizing the dangers of talking alone on cellulars so if governments impose harsh restrictions, what would make the people at Nokia, Ericsson or any other phone make think that people would dish out for a full blown laptop phone when they'd be restricted on its use?
Example, many of the counties in my state (New York) ban driving while speaking on a cellphone, and many restaurants in New York City have begun banning people from speaking on cells while they dine. Now imagine if these restrictions became the norm all over the place... Shit it'd be useless to have a web capable phone. Aside from that are things going a bit far where these companies think technology will be something everyone would need to survive?
Want Root?
Reading the summary, and having a lot of respect for what the authors had to say on other topics convinced me it wasn't worth my while to bother with WAP.
The WAP Usability Report (available in PDF form for $26) reports on a study where 20 people were given WAP enabled phones for a week and asked to report back on their experiences. The study was done in London because of the advanced state of WAP services there. Read the summary here.
- 70% of users reported they would not use WAP within a year
- One user calculated it was cheaper to buy a newspaper and throw away everything but the TV listings rather than use WAP to check the BBC schedule
The summary says: These are the same guys who test out concepts in web page design by sitting real users in front of browsers and watching them use the net. You may be familiar with some of the principles:- Jakob Nielson
- Don Norman, author of The Design of Everyday Things, Things that Make Us Smart and The Invisible Computer
- Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini, one of the original designers of the Macintosh UI and author of Tog on Interface. Check out Tog's Software Design Bookstore
to learn how to write software that doesn't suck. Read Top 10 Reasons the Apple Dock Sucks.
I strongly recommend anyone producing either content or software for the web regularly read Jakob Nielson's http://www.useit.com, where you could have found out before you invested that neither WAP nor advertising on the Web work.I link these and a couple other useful sites in my brief section on Some Web Application Design Basics in Use Validators and Load Generators to Test Your Web Applications:
Mike
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
Last time I checked, 8 of the top 10 WAP sites were porn. PORN, fer cryin out loud, on a 1 bit, B&W, stamp-sized display. Wow, how hard-up for a woman do you have to be to surf WAP porn sites?
Granted, a large part of the problem is that there aren't enough WAP-enabled devices in the hands of consumers. But so far, I just don't see anything productive materializing from WAP.
I don't want to screw around with a numeric keypad for messaging. I don't want to attempt to use a 2" screen to read the daily news. I don't have any interest in postage-stamp porn. I don't want time-delayed stock quotes. I certainly am not going to use my phone to buy anything.
I'm not alone. Most people in the US and Europe just aren't clamoring for this technology. In looking for the next big thing, the tech investment community made this enormous 800-lb. gorilla made entirely of vapor.
Sure, the Japanese dig instant messaging with their mobile phones. But they're also into animae, robot dogs, and anything that is miniaturized. Some things just don't translate. Happily, the world isn't completely homogenized yet.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
If the above is correct, which other posts are saying it isn't, then your own argument works against you. If the only translation is at the content level, and that's only because of bandwidth restrictions, then there's no need for them! All there needs to be is a very simple javascript handler in the browser, and an industry-standard wap-browser navigator object. Then everyone can do a tiny bit of browser detection and provide a low-bandwidth copy of their site. Voila, no flashy shit, and a website that's designed for your viewing requirements with no stupid protocol conversions.
Anyhow, I hate having to do browser detection. The web should be "code once, run anywhere" not "code eight times just in case some idiot insists on using a DSL modem with a 386 and a copy of Mosaic.
toeslikefingers.com - because
Australia and New Zealand are the same. How can you possibly charge the person receiving the calls? What a bizarre pricing scheme! It's also opposite to the way interconnect charges are paid by the telcos. Which countries do this? I think Scandinavia does, but didn't think it was widespread.
toeslikefingers.com - because
Well the way they handle that here is that the user pays "what they should reasonably expect to pay." This means if you're on global roam and someone calls you from home, they pay a local mobile call, you pay for the call to leg it round the world. Hence, global roam is only really any good if your business is picking up the tab.
toeslikefingers.com - because
Nah, I actually meant NTSC & ISDN. They're my two pet peeves. NTSC's quality is rubbish compared to PAL. And why have 56k when you could have 64?
toeslikefingers.com - because
No, still don't see anything good about it. New Zealand has free local calls as well. All they need to key on is the first few numbers, same as any other route. Probably the stupidity again comes from a lack of standards used in the US. You guys don't all have GSM, I hear. That's useless.
Just about every standard there is was made as a proprietary system by Americans and then bettered by European standards bodies. Pity the US never seems to wait for the good stuff to come through. I'm sure *that's* a good reason WAP ain't doing so well, too:/
toeslikefingers.com - because
AllOutWap.com ranks the top sites.
Answer? Porn, Sports and (mobile phone) Ring-Tones..
Porn, although originally referring to writing about prostitutes, usually means images. I remember ASCII Art nudes in High School (early 80's): zit-stricken geeks hunched around a green-screen blurring their vision every-so-slightly to make out that picture of Victoria Principal. Real cool. I can (thank the Powers) only imagine how images look on Nokia 61xx Dark-Gray/Light-Gray screens.... If you're going to appeal to the Internet masses, you need to display full color motion pictures (well, you can cheat and optimize the display for flesh tones and rocking motions).
Although the marketing people understand the need to push porn (why else is it called W(h)AP and PALM PILOT?) the engineers are just figuring this out (evidently). How discouraging that your product has to appeal to the lowest common motivator to be accepted.
Why is it call High Tech, again?
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-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Yes, it's about time indeed.
For those of us using a more sane phone, that's 4817022688084631 (including a single-quote, and it's 10 keypresses cheaper!). (In actual fact, that string will probably work with any T9-enabled phone.)
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It gets worse. Try to make an airline reservation.
Automated voice-based services are an alternative, but they suck too. As an exercise, call TellMe 1-800-555-TELL and order a movie ticket. Can you do it in less than five minutes? You'll have to listen to several ads along the way, which you can't skip.
- Graceful Degradation of Scalable Internet Services, from October 1999, calls WAP the Wrong Approach to Portability and generally trashes the idea that cell phones as we know them will ever be productive 'net access devices.
- In WAP Backlash, from July 2000, he says "skip the current generation of WAP" and trashes it some more. Plus he says "I told you so" a couple times.
- WAP Field Study Findings, December 2000; good quote: "Considering that WAP users pay for airtime by the minute, one of our users calculated that it would have been cheaper for her to buy a newspaper and throw away everything but the TV listings than to look up that evening's BBC programs on her WAP phone." Trashes WAP some more, says "I told you so" a couple more times (God, he loves saying that
;).
Anyway, good stuff if you want a user-centric view of why WAP tanked.question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
WAP isn't the real problem. If anything, it's that stripped down language WML. The only crimp WAP adds is that ridiculous per transfer byte limit, a bit under 1.5k, the compressed version that is. But the real problem is-- unsurprisingly-- the crusty hardware the stuff runs on. Unless this new standard insists on certain minimal UI... mostly, real keyboards or an acceptable substitute like graffiti... it's not going to be much better. And while we're dreaming, lets get a decent price structure where the cost of contacting me by cellphone is your expense, not mine, and text messages are cheaper than the bandwidth needed for talking.
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SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
- WAP may suck, but not as much as people claim: I mean, the majority of wapsites are not created with care. They usually don't care about usability and user comfort, as Jakob Nielsen says; most of them don't mind about making too much accesses to the wireless network instead of pushing the limits of the phone memory and not rethinking the whole content for the wireless medium. The bare 1300 and something bytes of max. wml deck of the Nokia 7110 (the phone reference), is enough to make some pretty things, but people prefer to link everything, despite the high user cost of accessing the wireless network.
- WAP insecure? no more than other services All the people who get in WAP always complain about the white spot that makes the WAP Gateway, but don't realize that this element in the architecture is the safest of all. It's easier to defend a single machine where you know exactly what kind of things it should be doing that any other, let's say a mirror of an ecommerce site database. Phone companies can monitor this machine well. And in the other side, if anyone gets to infiltrate in the gateway, he would have to search and identify very volatile tiny strigs of plaintext in
,tipically, 4Gb memory of a monitored server, and believe me, even having full root access to the server it's almost impossible.
- The real reason with the failure of WAP services: I have observed during all this wireless hype that the real reason for peole rejecting WAP is that the services already made doesn't give the people using it real value and they are very overpriced. All the sites offer the same: some news, stock info... that's all? And all of this is billed at such astronomical prices that is cheaper buying a whole newspaper that consulting a news item on WAP. I have calculated that the right price to make wireless services explode would be about 0.60 euros per Megabyte transferred.
Right now I'm developing my own personal services, using a very good mobile phone (Ericsson R520m). By the moment I can program my coffe machine by WAP, and also I'm starting to use WAP push services to be notified of important news events and having the information I really care wherever I go. Believe me, with GPRS networks, a right billing scheme and good personalized services WAP sucks a lot lessWhy bother with these stripped down, non standard protocols at all ??
WAP has provisions for identifying the user agent. It can use the data from this to provide customized content for larger sizes if it wants. Its too much effort (money) for most people to do, so they go for the lowest common denominator.
Special Relativity: The person in the other queue thinks yours is moving faster.
This was always a nonsense claim, since people were running IP over 2400 baud modems 10+ years ago, which is about as high latency, low bandwidth as you can get. IP protocol stacks typically have trouble keeping up with high bandwidth links such as fibre, not the low end.
The real reason was control: anything interoperable with the regular Internet would have been impossible to charge a premium for. This resulted in a separate WAP-Internet that didn't have the same level of content as the regular Internet. Users stayed away in droves.
Let's hope the new "wireless Internet" is based on existing standards this time, instead of something they made up out of thin air.
Is it? I use my cel to get the news on the way in to work everyday and to check my mail (no, not while I'm driving! I take light rail or commuter public transit) and while I'd like a larger screen and better UI, I always thought those were incremental issues rather than systemic.
this is getting old and so are you
blog
The problem with WAP is that it was designed for really small screens with 3 or 4 lines, which looks great on a phone but isn't taking full advantage of a PDA. That's why AvantGo and Palm's browser aren't WAP based, because they want to be able to do and show more than WAP can offer.
Help find a cure for cancer!
They should have listened to the users and developers, who told them they weren't happy with WAP. But the problem is, they wanted a standard that they could control, so they could extort providers and charge businesses $30,000 (or however much it is now) to be a member of the WAP forum.
It's the small businesses that invested so much money in the technology that will ultimately pay for the industries mistakes. The large companies which control the standards got a lot more out of it than they ever put in, just not as much as they were hoping for.
On a related note, my favorite non-wap wireless internet service.
Slightly slanted article. WAP (also misnamed WAPI by some e-bizzers) has its place. It's amazingly simple at giving you old and crusty stock quotes.
I love SprintPCS's attempt at online chat through their WAP browser: "i wuv you aways m0mmie ddeares7." {3.5 hours to type that}
Seems like WAP was already doomed last year. The Brits and euro web developers were already shunning WAP last year.
I can still remember the system architects at work drumming up white papers to convice an outpouring of cash into R&D for WAP but it never quite got anywhere. Who has the time to drive (late) to work and do their makeup and hair much less key 4445533111229955 on their cell for the favorite stock quote?
WAP was just an application layer above GPRS. If this M-Services is it's replacement for WAP, how can it 'offer faster GPRS'. GPRS is the transport layer.
It be kinda like saying that using gzip to compressed a file before transfering, is offering faster dial-up.
By the way, is GPRS deployed anywhere in the US?
Do you need buy.com Coupons
Looking for any old 8-bit Heathkit/Zenith software/hardware - http://heathkit.garlanger.com
Hey how come iMode never comes up in these discussions of wireless internet? OK, I know it's a proprietary protocol, but the point is that
a) it works, and
b) it gets used.
Having just worked in Japan for 6 months the thing I couldn't help noticing was that everybody's phone was much cooler than any of the ones available at home: lighter, smaller, cheaper, more functions, longer battery life etc(not just that they were shaped like Hello Kitty) and that most of my mates at work had readable colour screens on their phones and used iMode all the time for useful stuff like checking timetables, getting prices, getting weather reports etc etc, and the connection prices didn't seem so high (well, compared to the cost of living in Japan, perhaps that doesn't mean much). The week before I returned, DoCoMo reported that they had 20 million iMode users - which seems like a lot to me.
So my question is: why don't DoCoMo set up iMode networks in other countries? IMHO, they'd do well, and we'd finally see some reasonable wireless services.