Slashdot Mirror
What Do You Use WAP For?
FePe asks: "I have a Siemens M55 with WAP support, and I have experimented a little with it. I can search on Google, upload my own pages in WML (try this on your mobile phone, which isn't a WML page, but it works anyway), and also browse other small regular HTML pages. It seems to me that nearly nobody uses WAP these days, at least that's what my impression is, so I was wondering if Slashdot readers use WAP, if you use it at all?"
WAP was designed as a dumbed down "html" using xml, speficially for devices with small screen sizes and slow processors. It was good for the cellphones at the time. Now, cells phones are much more powerful, often come with colour screens featuring more pixels -- enough to be usable on legacy (html 4.0) webpages. And if a website is properly designed with CSS for layout, these new phones have no problem displaying the content of existing webpages, eliminating the whole need of WAP.
And thus WAP died.
He who laughs last is stuck in a time dilation bubble.
I often use wap for googling for facts & checking my emails when its my only cheap net access (when i'm not at university).
You can use google's excelent wml conversion facility to view the text of lots of web pages.
Handy when bored, but not really functional for major tasks.
It costs me per kilobyte to use anything that accesses the web on my phone. So I don't. They can give me unlimited night and weekends to anywhere in the country, but if I try to access Google they try to take both my arms and one of my legs.
This might explain why few people use WAP.... Use it once and after you get the bill you are no longer able to push the buttons on your phone...
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
Hmmm.
I get wap over GPRS so its reasonably fast. I have a P800 so the screen is a reasonable size. I don't pay a fixed fee for my GPRS so I don't get
generic IP access so I can't run a web browser or
use the built in email reader.
However, I can go to wap.yahoo.co.uk and read
mail at my yahoo account and I can reply via my
phone if I need to. I can also send instant
messages to people such as "Turn your phone on!!".
You may think wap died but I use it regularly to
check my mail without having to pay extra for web
access. I count this as usefull and not a sign of
death in any way.
I also sometimes use it in bed to check the news
headlines to see if anything really important and
worth getting up for has happened. It usually
hasn't.
Bob.
There seems to be some confusion about what WAP is (including in some modded-up postings).
WAP is a family of protocols, documented here.
WML is an obsolescent markup code that is part of the WAP family. It has been "replaced" by XHTML Mobile Profile in the sense that phone manufacturers recommend XHTML-MP as the forward path. It has not been replaced in many phones that are still in the active user base.
Many people suggest that current Web standards (XHTML + CSS) mean there is no need for specialized support of handheld devices. This opinion generally is held by people who (a) do not actually use phone-based wireless browsers and (b) have not read the XHTML-MP standard and have not yet discovered that it might be nice to, for example, click and dial a phone number.
Yes, WAP is heavily used in Europe, but it's usually been branded as something else, e.g. T-Mobile's T-Zones or Vodafone Live. Calling it "WAP" now would be a marketing disaster, even though the various protocols are pretty good at their jobs. Blame the Nokia 7110 - that heap of second-hand silicon only implemented about half the standard, and the efforts of the early content providers to support it led to bad sites.
The only time that I really feel a need for WAP is looking up flight gates and status on the way to the airport. It's great to know if your flight is delayed ahead of time, but WAP tends to be too slow and clumsy for anything else.
Honestly, I use WAP because I'm too cheap to buy a data cable for my phone. Whenever I want to put a MIDI ringtone or a wallpaper on my phone, I just put it up on my server (since these tend to be small and I have a 256kb upload connection, this usually takes less than 5 seconds of my time) and use my phone's browser to download it. Easy, simple, and I save myself 20 bucks.
"Each time you smile, it'll only last awhile. Life may be scary, but it's only temporary."
How do you do that? Amazon US's mobile interface isn't WAP, but HDML, which my phone (Siemens M46) doesn't support. I looked around a bit, and couldn't find a WAP inteface, so I ended up throwing together a quickie PHP script that queries Amazon's XML interface and returns the results as WAP/WML.
I don't use WAP myself. Typing on a phone keyboard and watching an ugly result on a tiny screen is really not attractive.
However I work for a national FM radio and we provide a bunch of related WAP site.
People really don't use WAP to check what is on air. Neither do they use it to get the frequency they can listen us, neither do they use it to read news about music. Well, they do, but only once, only very quickly.
What they are spending time on, and what they are wasting money for is the chat section. The chat features geolocalisation so they send stupid messages to nearby people, hoping for a fuck. I don't know whether it actually works, but at least they try a lot.
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