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WAP is Dead, Long Live WAP
antimatt writes "Everyone knows WAP is dead. It was dead on arrival. Right? Wrong. WAP use, at least in the UK, is up 42% in the last year. Are we seeing postmortem twitching, or a phoenix rising from the wireless ashes?" While the first incarnation was pretty rough, WAP is slowly growing into what people had hoped the first version would be. Now if only it just lost the stigma attached to it.
In the UK WAP is up 42% last year
Oh yeah WAP is up infinitely higher in the US. I just turned on my WAP phone to see if it still works so the number will show 1/0 for the year.
.. and it'll gain another 100%.
I won't believe it until Netcraft confirms it.
---
Those who can, do
Those who can't, teach
Those who don't know how, supervise
is that an infinite number of users??.. ;P
WAP 1 had some limitations and faults, but much of that has been addressed in WAP 2. However WAP 2 is only supported by newer, higher end phones.
Sigs cause cancer.
We already have a language which was designed to scale very far up or down, and to adapt itself to disparate display environments: HTML.
And if people would just use it as intended, rather than trying to smother it in ecmascript, flash, et al, we wouldn't need to come up with a whole new protocol every time a new display gadget becomes popular.
The only reason the usage has gone up is that everyone's using WAP to cheat on pub quizzes by using Google.
The WAP standard is not closely followed by all phone/PDA browsers. You have the openwave browser working pretty well with it, and then you have the Nokia phones crashing the whole phone with some markup (even valid markup).
People should fix their browsers, it not just a matter of fixing WAP itself only.
Back before I lost my job and had to cut back on IP compatibility on my cell phone. Been 6 months working again- and I hope to clear up the credit by this time next year.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
My main problem with wap was that it costed 10p/minute. I used it a bit when I had a month for free, but haven't used it since. What's the point in investing huge amounts of money in something, and then making it so expensive that no one will use it?
Most new phones, at least over here in germany, are branded by the provider. Of course it is technically possible to flash the software but most users keep whatever their phone carries.
This means that some keys are preprogrammed to dialup the default GPRS-connection whenever they get pressed (mostly by accident when the phone is in the pocket and you forgot to lock the keyboard). Maybe the service gets really more popular but I would love to see a statistic that shows how many connections are dialed by mistake.
I live in the UK and now after more and more mobile phone offer services such as Colour backrounds, Java Gaming, Ringtones ETC, many websites have started up to give theese for free through wap, which was the main useage between myself and friends, also things such as Vodaphones "Live" service helps, giving a user friendly portal to services that are actully USEFUL, things like train and bus times etc, and because this is set up through the provider, you are linked striaght into the information service. GPRS also will have played a factor in this as there is no more dialing up, or costs per min. Christ even my mother looks up bus/train times on her mobile, and downloads dodgy ringtones!
Everyone knows that random statements of "X is dead" are always to be taken seriously...
BSD is dead.
What about xhtml? Even my crappy Nokia 6800 supports this and WAP 1.2.1...
Sounds like you've had a bad experience with WAP -- one that's probably quite uncommon. My girlfriend and I both use WAP to read news etc. during boring classes, as well as check stocks etc. Loads very fast (about 3-4 seconds to load a page, even when using CSD and not GPRS).
Speaking of which, when will we see WML version of Slashdot? Currently I use http://slashdot.org/palm as the homepage in my cellphone, which works fine, but a true WAP page would be better.
As the (on topic) side note there is no reason for WAP to die, as it actually is pretty useful. Not only for gratuities checking slashdot and news on the cellphone, but for truly useful things. The public transport system here has a WAP page for checking timetables, which is pretty useful if you don't want to walk from the bar to the busstop only to find you have a halfhour's wait.
Several TV channels here also put out all there tele-text material on wap, which is nice because it is brief, up to date, and meant to read on a low res screen. The only thing wrong with WAP is the silly price for wireless data (2 Euro per meg!)
Ive been using WAP & GPRS to read slashdot with when I'm on the run. I wasn't until I got GPRS I used it and it's still a bit clunky because you have to use a proxy, but it's it'll sooth you when you can't get an internet connection.
WAP is the sound your WAP-enabled phone makes when you throw it in the trashcan!
Former Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf
And the wikipedia link on the word WAP contains this:
WAP has seen huge success in Japan
Who cares about some device-specific protocol anyways? Does it really affect my life if people are using it or not?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
There are few problems with WAP usages, at least from my personal point of view.
First is the cost, it's not that cheap to use it yet as most service providers are charging by the seconds or bytes.
Secondly, some phone designs are not good enough to use WAP comfortably, but I am sure this will change with more all-you-can-eat phones coming out.
On top of that, there isn't enough incentive for site owners to provide a WAP friendly interface, because there isn't much to make out of it.
Maybe if phone service providers start offering 'referral incentive' to sites, that is, to pay site owners $0.001 per visit via mobile phone, we might be seeing something very quickly.
Personally I believe providers make more than enough to pay that incentive, and with more sites becoming WAP friendly, more users will start using WAP, and the more the providers will make, and the more they can afford to pay site owners or lower the WAP access cost.
Uselessful technology (Air-Charged
My phone has the real internet, though the more compicated sites don't work right.
WAP's problem is the developer has to put in extra effort just to deliver a crappy version.
XHTML and the real internet is the future. Flash is a cancer.
The UK is more urban than the US. S. Korea is more urban than the US. These gagets, especially cell phones, facilitate an urban lifestyle by allowing quick communication between people away from a phone. Cell phones just don't make as much sense in rural areas because even if you could see somone, he or she might be 50 miles away. Quick action in social networks is more essential in a densly populated populated areas, thus allowing the growth of cell phones. Like any other gadget, e.g. the computer (internet), phone (fax), and electricity (telegraph), it's natural for changes in the communication protocal to grow off it. I predict that within 10 years the videophone will be in majority use in Seoul and Hong Kong.
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
The soul usage for WAP that i've actually found useful is to remote control my computers. Nothing like reviewing logs on that fishing trip =P
Yes, i know i'm hopeless.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
the itu got caught off guard by the popularity of sms and feel that they undercharged for it. now they have the debts from the 3g grab the money auctions in the uk and are trying any way they can to get people to use their cellular charge per meg bandwidth. Pictures didn't tempt people so here is new WAP to encourage us all to forget about those pesky bills and keep these poor starving telco businesses in profit.
wap was never alive :)...at least in Greece.
Sourdia Rulez
This is one of my biggest pet peeves. I own (and love) a Treo 600. Got it for $400 on eBay; the best $400 I've ever spent. I love being able to SSH, send and recevie email, and log onto AIM from my phone! However, online wireless content is severely lacking.
My worst pet peeve about the wireless world in general is that there just isn't enough content out there designed for mobile devices. Ever tried to load movies.yahoo.com on a Treo? Even at 144K speeds (twice as fast as a 56K modem), the movies.yahoo.com page takes forever to load because it's a 250K+ page. How about citysearch.com? Also horribly bloated.
I have Small Sites set up as my home page on my Treo, but most of the sites it links to are outdated, toast, or horribly broken. For instance, Yahoo! Movies is on there, but is often broken ("Page not found", anyone?) Citysearch or a comparable site doesn't even make the list.
Why can't I log on, type in my zip code, and get movies, restaurants, maps, and driving directions from my Treo? That's 90% of what I need WAP for. But the "portal" sites seem like an artifact of the dot-com boom -- missing or outdated information, or whole pages that just don't work.
Yahoo/other portal companies, are you listening? Please create a WAP or "wireless-web"-capable interface for me (and the thousands of others like me who know how frustrating it is to load a 200K page on a Treo or similar device.)
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
Don't blame the slow service on WAP. WAP is a decent GPRS connection is better than snappy.
That isn't WAP, that has to do with your data connection. WAP is a standard for web browsers on mobile devices - it defines markups and alike.
In GSM networks you can run WAP over GSM data, GPRS, or 3G networks, which will give increasingly good performance.
(2) Corporations see the potential, and start huge marketing campaigns;
(3) Industy trend setter (Wired, etc.) hype the technology beyond means;
(4) Technology doesn't deliver, because it isn't mature yet (and applications are missing);
(5) Industry trend setter declare the technology dead;
(6) Surprise - years later, the technology has a comeback, often without ordinary folks even noticing.
I have seen this happening often (Java, Bluetooth, etc.), and it seems to happen again. I once heard that new technologies, no matter whether software or otherwise, take an average of seven years to mature. Java is a great example: Released in 1995, and hyped like crazy, failed to deliver. Interestingly enough, it got hyped as a web language and succeeded in the enterprise.
Back to WAP: The article acknowledges this mechanism:
"WAP has such a negative stigma attached to it because that's what carriers marketed several years ago, rather than what could be done with WAP"
Pure marketing hype, without knowing how to deliver.
"... the technology got the blame for misguided and poorly implemented content."
Like with Java, the application of the technology was not yet completely understood.
"The majority of users don't care how their phone gets the news headlines or sports scores"
Let's face it: Most technologies get only powerful and influencial once they are not sexy any more - and even then only geeks will notice.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
I think WAP is a very cool and convenient technology, it's the best thing since sliced bread and it lets me
more...
is that vendors are only just starting to really make the effort with their portal services. For example, I (in the UK), am on Orange, it's only recently that the majority of people have had WAP compatible phones, so it's only recently Orange have really made the effort to provide a decent WAP service. Add to this the slow (but now nearly there) uptake of GPRS, and it's not surprising it's taken until now for WAP to become popular. I've only just started to use it myself.
Another reason it's use is picking up (I would think...) is that you can buy java games, ringtones, graphics etc from your provider via WAP, which is now a big business.
WAP on a modern 3G telephone works good.
:)
Now, when will we see a wap version of slashdot?
Adding to my earlier rant in this same article, what's up with the Slashdot WAP page? Sure, the articles are nice, but "Top 5 comments" only? How useful is that?
Why doesn't Slashdot have an option to view the whole article including comments? Better yet, why can't we view the article in "light" mode without all that crufty table formatting?
Perhaps I'm asking for a lot from a site that still uses HTML 3.2 (and can't even seem to conform to that standard), but honestly, folks, it's not 1998 any more. There are a lot of people out there who would love to view Slashdot and other sites through Palm-type browsers, but when there's no content, there's not much reason to do so. Phones are becoming more and more advanced, but very few websites seem to be pushing the cutting edge in mobile compatibility.
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
If http://www.imdb.com/ would build a nice and clean wap interface to their movie database, then I would use wap a lot more than I do today.
We use WAP for tracking Euro banknotes while travelling. Most of the notes are entered via the web form, but when you're travelling you may not have an internet connection available all the time and that's where WAP comes handy. I just spent a weekend in Brussels in our annual EuroBillTracker meeting, my life would have been miserable if I didn't have my phone with me ;) Unfortunately there are some bugs and limitations in phones that need to be worked around somehow.
Follow your Euro bills at EBT
Please everyone, stop modding this asshole up. He's just pimping his stock scam site.
And AT&T is one of the worst cell providers for cost, get Sprint you wanker, unlimited data. Of course, you can probably afford AT&T because of all the money you stock scam out of people.
why does every single post of yours on slashdot mention your shitty pump and dump stock scam ?
why are you really here on slashdot ? perhaps you would do better if you concentrated on your portfolio's selection rather than spam people with pump and dump scams , maybe the authorities should take a closer look at you
This topic has been already discussed at /. February 2004: What Do You Use WAP For?. I still can see from the footprints of mobile cell phones in my Apache log files, that many people are using the WAP format of TuxMobil - Linux On Laptops, PDAs and Mobile Cell Phones. Also the i-mode format is used, too.
Well, being the 'UK' as Tony Bliar & co. like to call us (I am English and live in England), a 42% increase in WAP from a base of negligable users == naff all.
Perhaps the real significant increase announced is that the Government can 'watch' 42% more people (than before) using this stuff.
That still == naff all.
Are we seeing postmortem twitching, I know little of WAP, but I believe the phrase that you are looking for is: "A dead cat bounce" :-)
All you need is a dialin modem (eg an old pay as you go mobile 8)) and a Linux box running kannel - now your normal call rate/sminutes apply. GPRS also helps a lot since its then traffic by usage. Certainly thats the big reason I now use the mobile phone stuff a lot more.
GPRS is actually a lot better for things like irc, which being such low traffic volumes means you can irc on long train journeys with your phone plugged into the sockets virgin trains now supply, and at a low typical cost.
WAP seems to be on the increase. I've had more mails in the past 3 months about the wapirc gateway I wrote for my old 7110 than in the 2 years before.
Following the miserable failure of WAP/bug-ridden implementation of WMLScript, lack of graphical api (Oooh lets use bitmap picture files for low bandwidth devices!) and poor user recognition, a new paradigm in WAP is coming, based on NTT Docomo's HTML subset called cHTML ...
It's known as "Compact WAP".
Or "cWAP" for short.
"It's not your information. It's information about you" - John Ford, Vice President, Equifax
Free content on a cell phone you say? With a limited display size, where the hell do you put the banner ads to pay for the content?
And we all know the web really took off for the same reason VHS did: Pr0n...
No pop-ups? No banner ads? No free content...
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
* is Dead, Long Live *
I hate this saying.
It is now official. Netcraft confirms: Eros is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Eros community when IDC confirmed that Eros market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 0.0001 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Eros has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Eros is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Research Projects That Promise Much But Go Nowhere networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Eros's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Eros faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Eros because Eros is dying. Things are looking very bad for Eros. As many of us are already aware, Eros continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Eros leader Jonathan Shapiro states that there are 7 users of Eros. How many users of KeyKos are there? Let's see. KeyKos at about 8 percent of the Eros market. Therefore there are 7 + 1 = 8 users of either Eros or KeyKos. This is consistent with the number of Eros Usenet posts.
Due to troubles at University of Pennsylvania, abysmal development speed and so on, Eros went through a "focus shift" by doing a useless rewrite in C and was taken over by Johns Hopkins University, who attempted to continue development on this troubled OS. Then the project was sidetracked while precious development resources went towards creating Yet Another Useless Version Control System. Now it is dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Eros has steadily declined in market share. Eros is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Eros is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. Eros continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Eros is dead.
Fact: Eros is dying
It has been years since I have done anything with it - but a major issue at the time was that it was not secure. It couldn't do SSL the way a traditional web browser can.
I don't really recall the how/why of this, I just recall it being a major reason that more stores weren't using it.
(that didn't stop the company I was at requesting that I port our storefront software that we were selling over to WAP - nothing like transactions over a non-secure connection)
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
Last year, 31 people used WAP. This year, 44 people used WAP, therefore usage has grown 42%.
We're supposed to be the insightful techies here, but obviously most people missed the cluetrain on this one:
The issue with WAP was never with the protocol itself, it was with the uselessly small LCD interface on phones that made it clunky and entirely non-user-friendly, not to mention the poor transport layer.
The standard 2004 digital mobile phone has larger and more useful display and keyboard interface, not to mention higher datarates thanks to GPRS -- meaning that any protocol (not just WAP) is far more useful.
I'm sure if you look at the statistics, you'll find that not only has WAP usage increased, but so has that of other features commensurate with the better phone UI.
So, if I understand you correctly:
- Set up a website.
- Stock scam out of people.
- Profit!!!
So, if I do frontal lobotomies on a bunch of scammers, I'll become rich from all the good karma I accrued, right?I find wap quite handy for reading RSS feeds from several sites including slashdot. Bloggo is a useful RSS to WAP translation service. I also access my Nagios monitoring server using WAP.
"Linux is a serious competitor"
- Steve Ballmer, Chief Executive Microsoft Corp.
Now if only it just lost the stigma attached to it.
You wouldn't by any chance mean 2x20 character displays, speed only comparable with modems that went the way of Dodo in 1993, pay-per-second pricing plans that would make Rockefeller think twice, and so much support from mobile carriers that not even a bacteria could live on it. Yes, you could call that a stigma.
On the other hand, we now have affordable color displays, pixel resolutions approaching that of VGA, GRPS that goes more than a tad faster than your vintage 9600 modem, pay-per-kb pricing plans that try to hook as many users as possible, and strong portal support from each and every mobile carrier. Now that I think goes a long way in explaining the raise in WAP usage...
Stigma or no stigma, the first and foremost question with WAP was what is it useful for. Up until recently the cost and effort to use anything WAP based was so high that there was really no content that was worth it. Now that the price to use it went radicaly down, speed had gone radicaly up, and displays have vastly improved, people just use it like they use any other cheap and useful service. You want latest headlines? Go WAP. Weather prognosis? Go WAP. Road conditions? Go WAP. Is it a wonder?
Anonymous Cowards Unite
5 minutes to load one page.. jesus
o ductSuite/DNA-WAP_Internet.htm for more information.
Bullshit, since I view Telephia rankings of all carriers statistics, ATT Wireless ranks fastest among carriers, its in seconds, not minutes. Not 1 carrier is slower than 30 seconds.
Telephia has wireless WAP devices in all major cities, and runs automated test suites every 15 minutes, then generates reports and alarms if an outage. The markets are much better than single users report. Most major companies have no issues nationwide, that you report.
Coverage is a different subject, since not all carriers cover the same areas. It's getting better with carriers (TDMA as an example) allowing free roaming (aka Cingular/ATTWS) for better coverage.
See, http://www.telephia.com/Products/ServiceQualityPr
Warning: new slashdot meta-meme in creation....
I copy and pasted the following from some cell phone company's website:
But apparently, this only counts for web pages which have been specially coded, not in HTML, but in a pared down version of the same called, WML, or "Wireless Markup-Language".
In my highly successful efforts to ignore all things 'Cell', the intricacies of WAP bypassed my give-a-hooey radar until I looked it up just now and pasted it here for the benefit of anybody else who doesn't keep up with the endless un-defined acronyms churned forth from the Slashdot forge.
(And yeah, I realize I'm probably in the minority in this particular instance, but that doesn't mean every last person out there isn't tripped up on an all-caps secret word from time to time!)
You gotta watch your step while tip-toeing through the web!
-FL
I don't really think that there is a stigma attached to WAP - the real problem as I see it is that it's never really been pushed by the mobile phone operators. Most people in the UK probably wouldn't even know what WAP is. The operators have been keen to push SMS and voice calls, but little effort has been seen to do much about mobile data. Vodafone with their 'Live' service is the only real marketed data service that I'm aware of in the UK. Of course, this will all change with the rollout of 3G networks and the fancy new phones that go with them (disclaimer: I work for a mobile phone tech company...) but as displays get larger and more colourful and browsers get better, I think that WAP will naturally gain a following as people simply use their phone to do more stuff.
Sure, but the thing you have to remember is that it's a lot easier to get sucked into paying for stuff when it just gets added on to your monthly bill (or taken out of your all-inclusive contract). There's no taking out your card to pay for it so users are more likely to think 'yeah, go on then, it's only 50p'...
Some people still insist on paying big $$$$$ (or £££) for ringtones but don't have a way to transfer them to the phone. This can most easily be accomplished by connecting to a WAP site.
For me, the T-Mobile WAP deck (T-Zones) is actually fairly useful... if only for the yellow pages and movie times functions.
--D
And I actually solved the argument with the use of my Hiptop.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
... I know what a 'tard is though: it's you!
Check out www.google.com/wml on your cell, go to the search options menu, an choose go to address. Enter slashdot.org. Works pretty well, I used it for a week when I was away from my computers... The sign of a true addict...
How about we just make cellphones that can render HTML, they can run Mozilla or something I dunno. Works for me. gzip compressed HTTP transefers are fastish and maybe phones could just send a header saying their lowbandwidth. less work than developing a WAP site... sheesh. Pretty sure a phone that runs Mozilla and fakes 1024x768 (downsample to 512x385) would sell well. My friend has a PDAphone that he uses to surf the web all the time. Works great why the hell would I write a WAP page when that's comming? big fat waste of money
WAP = Wireless Application Protocol
;)
It used to be only WML (Well WMLC, compiled WML) that was sent over WAP, now it's XHTML. This is a convergence between desktop markup and wireless markup. In anycase they were right in that WML was dead. Unfortunately for them you can put anything over WAP even MMS traffic.
I have laughed and laughed as people claimed that WAP was dead meanwhile I log into gateway servers and see WAP traffic increase.
Maybe people will listen to me now? nah.
2 years and no mod points. Join reddit. Because openness is good.
LOL. Damn, and I just killed my mod priveliges by posting in this thread a moment ago (before this). Oh well.
pseudomod: +1 Funny
Furry cows moo and decompress.
Here's my wishlist for what /. needs to improve in its "lite"/wap/palm version:
1. Let me log in for crying out loud. I'm a paid subscriber dammit! Plus, slashdot activity contributes to mod points, and my wireless activity goes completely unrecognized. Give me credit for credit due.
2. I love the "top 5" comments, and sometimes that's all I want to see. But please, do let me see all comments if I want to. Sometimes one of the "top 5" comments will generate lots of good discussion in reply that I then miss.
3. Let me post. We all know you can't get "first post" if you have to wait until you can get to a "real" screen. Just today I was bitten by this big time -- by the time I got back to my desk to say "hey, why not display pr0n on a girl's boobs", the joke was already old.
4. Dunno if this happens on wap phones, but at least on my treo 600, the last character in a post or on a page is often dropped. Makes links broken, and often removes the final punctuation character from a poster's comment. It's probably also related that <blockquote> sections and other formatting doesn't carry over to "next page".
All of that said, I wish every site had a lite/wap version that was even as broken as slashdot's. It's very quick and handy. Viewing normal HTML pages sucks over GPRS. Even a less-than-optimal lite interface is MUCH better than none at all for information browsing.
Slashdot can do better here, but it is still a leader.
$0.02,
ptd
I'm an animal lover -- they're delicious!
I'm in the UK, and since getting a new Sony Ericsson K700i a month ago, my WAP use has really taken off. It's so much faster than the last time I tried using it. But half of that experience depends on the sites you go to. I'm with Orange, and their WAP sites really suck. Too many graphics on them make them slower than average to load and navigate.
The best site I've come across so far is bbc.co.uk/mobile. It's quick to load because it's very light on graphics, and the content is just everything I need when I'm away from my PowerBook. From the most recent news stories, to Traffic information. The latter is especially useful, as I can quickly search for accidents/road works on the Motorways (Freeways) I plan my use on my journey. And from time to time, when I unexpectedly find myself stuck in a traffic jam and I want to know what's happened ahead to cause it.
I even used WAP recently to check the horse racing result for a friend who wanted to know if she'd won on a bet she'd placed that morning. I found the site and had the results up in minutes. Oh, and she had won too.
It really is a hell of a lot more useful than it used to be.
There are new technologies like on2go which allow live streaming data to the phone. They are like Telletext, but for the phone. It allows you in real-time to see if traffic on a road is getting worse or better. Or if your stocks are going up :) or down :( It is kind of like a combination between WAP and SMS. According to thier web site it was started by a bunch of guys that got frustrated with the cost of SMS and limited appeal of WAP
On2go are meant to be in to be in beta testing at the moment and if people want to try out the service they can sign up on the on2go web page.
Someone bump this anon up please. Telephia has some good stats on telcos.
If you ever tried using WAP and then have tried using iMode's CHTML, you would see why WAP is a steaming pile of doo doo.
... the chances of your app working on someone's phone is close to zero.
CHTML is a nice clean subset of HTML (think HTML 2.0) which supports all the stuff you're used to, forms, gifs, etc.
WAP, on the other hand, has a broken idea about "decks" of cards, which they thought would be needed for 400 baud connections or whatever it was designed for.
Writing WAP applications is irritating, because they don't work. The gateway you're using has the wrong max packet size, or the phone you're using doesn't support the image format, or
iMode, on the other hand, works on all iMode phones, they have fanatical quality control and DoCoMo calls the compatibility shots.
Calling WAP a success but the implentation a failure is like calling Communism a success in theory, but it just had a poor implementation.
Say it with me people... WAP is a protocol not a an application or a browser. Saying WAP is crap is like saying HTTP is crap.
WAP has been used to provide MMS services along with XHTML and WML in Australia for some time now.
Sure, WML is crap, but that has little to do with WAP.
I'm sorry but where does the 1.1 billion come from in the link to ZDNET it quotes? The quoted article states WAP views have doubled to "22.5 million impressions". I quote:
Figures released by the Mobile Data Association (MDA) show that use of the most popular mobile data services, including SMS, MMS and WAP, have all doubled over the past year and it expects WAP traffic to reach eight billion impressions by the end of 2004. (emphasis mine)
It hardly rates as a popular mobile service. In the UK alone 111 million SMS messages were sent just on New Years Eve. Here it states 2.1 billion text messages were sent last year in the UK alone. That makes WAP traffic seem pretty miniscule.
Basically WAP is rubbish and always has been. The decision to charge an obscene amount per minute killed it. Even if mobile operators offered free WAP (which they won't) and instead creamed profit off transactions, the stigma is so bad no-one will go near it. WAP is definately dead. Even before phones started getting powerful enough to have proper embedded web browsers.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
I'm Italian, you insensitive clod!
bluetooth started out with a big *KER-FLOP*
however, it's just now starting to pick up. because people realise "hey! we can use this technology over this other technology and get the same results with much less power!"
there have been various technologies in the past that we se today that were considered DOA.
I cant remember which..
I agree that Three in the UK is retarded (especially when the likes of Three Australia offer services like GPRS surfing, unrestricted).
Hutchinson 3D have stuffed the entire company full of morons and luddites. There is a shortage of talented people in the industry, apparently Hutchinson don't have any of them, instead they have recent graduates with no real clue about the industry, slick marketing weasels and flight by night smooth talking consultants who've managed to con the slick marketing boi's in to hiring them. I am quite confident they are doomed in the UK, and will be eaten alive by the competition.
I wrote to Three asking why:
a) They don't allow you to use to the build in Email client (which supports POP and IMAP) with any other server than theirs (which makes your 400+ UKP phone useless for email, even my 35 UKP Ericsson on Vodafone can do IMAP and POP over GPRS and has been doing this for the last 2 years).
[Answer: They have no clue about what their customers want or what's important to them, or apparently what the competition provide.]
b) Why they don't have a service in place to allow you to use the build in Opera web browser - or a Buetooth connection via a laptop/PDA to surf the web and/or access the full Internet when Vodafone have been doing this for at least a couple of years now (which GPRS, and a respectable service too, even though it fubars when you try and maintain a connection going through a zone). With Three in the UK you can ONLY access THEIR website. Gosh that's useful!
[Answer: Same reason as above.]
I also wouldn't mind them explaining, in their own words:
c) Why they have deliberately enabled the protection on the phone to prevent users from installing third party software. Given it's a PDA hybrid running Sybian and there are hundreds of apps available (and merrily used by other Symbian based phone users, like those on Vodaphone).
[Answer: They want you to ONLY buy their software so they can rake in 'phat lewt'. Problem is that consists entirely of a small number of utterly piss poor games, zero productivity software. Worse, every game needs to authenticate on the network meaning it doesn't work 8 out of 10 times (and 0/10 on the tube, where most people play games on their phone anyway). And I'm central bloody London - Zones 1 & 2. If anywhere in the country has service it should be here, but no it's crap and 'falls back' to other non 3G networks about 80%+ of the time.]
d) Why although my phone (with the big fancy GPS letters on the back) supports global positioning for finding local services within a few yards (pretty much a core feature of the service they tout), why then is it only able to guess my position within a few miles (not much use when you are looking for 'somewhere to eat/a bank/tube station near my location'?)
[Answer: They have not configured their network appropriately so although the technology is basically there to support this, in the UK they don't have an implementation which carries the field that holds this information in the packet data. Money well spent then. Piss up and brewery spring to mind.]
I have twice emailed them asking them about (a) and (b) and when they planned to do something about them. Both replies I got indicated they had ABSOLUTELY NO CLUE that it was possible to connect to the internet via a GRPS phone with Bluetooth and a laptop. They didn't have the first clue about GPRS, or Bluetooth and were entirely confused that I might want to use the two together.
I've also three times spoken to them on the phone, on every occasion they displayed only a rudimentary grasp of English and little understanding of phone terminology and as such they were totally unable to help me on every occasion. I don't mind call centres being outsourced at all, but they damn well ought to well speak the language of the country who's people they are supporting or it's a total waste of bloody time. Apparently, they don't care about customer service at Three.
Goo
imchk, check Gaim IMs from your WAP phone.
--pyro_dude
WAP is alive and well, and is used for mobile porn.
My provider gave me absolutely no info about what info I can get access to and how, and still gives absolutely no info on how to use the WAP browser on my phone. It has extensive online documentation for all the other stuff (phoning, voicemail, SMS, SMS to lists of recipients), but when it comes to WAP it's only some very short uninteligible technical instructions about proxy settings (without providing the info to put in, just a translation of manufacturer instructions, it seems) and that's about it.
A couple of years ago, when I planned to upgrade my former 3yr+ cellphone, I tried to learn from my provider what I get from their "internet enabled" phones (no one I knew used their cell phones for anything related to internet except using it as a modem with a laptop where landline was not available). The only thing a representative could tell me is that "it is not the internet you know. It's a different kind of internet", and she couldn't tell me any more info. Eventually I just took one of the cheapest deals without taking any "internet considerations" (the free hands free+instalation in car was a consideration). That very cheap phone (Samsung SGH R-220 GSM dualband, known around here as Samsung 514) has some WAP capabilities. I tried it in the first month when I got something like 60 free minutes, and didn't get to anything useful. The WAP browser button took me to a page full of links to the provider's promoted info (horoscope and other useless stuff) and scrolling several pages down brought me to a place to enter a full URL, or search. THe searches didn;t give anything useful. I had no URL I knew of to use, except for my email provider's experimental WAP gateway (wap.fastmail.fm) and then I couldn't figure out how to enter some of the characters in the password: the method used by the browser to produce characters was different from the one used by the phone (phonebook+SMS) and was undocumented, of course. Eventually I went through the trouble of creating a separate email account with a letters only password, and filtering rules to forward a copy of each message that is not to big and satisfies some more criteria (such as being sent to some particular addresses and not others) and could use wap to login to that account and see the messages. However many messages required several cellphone screens just to read the subject line, and many required manually decoding "quoted-printable" or "base64" encodings to really read the subject lines. It took about 5 minutes just get to the login page, login to the account and see some subject lines, so it was not worth the trouble (might be worth the trouble if I expected something very important, but then, I could ask to be notified by phone, and if it is something that cannot be transferred bu phone conversation, then it is probably not readable on a cellphone screen).
I can see good use for wap, but not with cellphone providers making it hard to get outside thair own portal to the real internet.
My mantra several years ago was "WAP is CRAP!". Last month I bought 2 Cybiko Extremes for £15. Now one is hooked up to an internet connected box and the other has a WAP browser running on it so I can catch news and google from around the house. I'm happy!
WAP is a whole application stack that specifies the content (WML, WMLScript), different bearers (TCP,SMS) and lots of glue to make them all work together.
The browser on you phone is either WML or XHTML (on newer phones)
It would appear from TFA that 3G is also being included in the statistics, which would explain the increase in usage. After all if you could get the footie and pr0n in fully colour on your mobile you would.
Music is everybody's possession.
It's only publishers who think that people own it.
Fuck Beta
~John Lenno
...checking the surf.
I've set up a WAP site that reads info from a data buoy offshore every hour and translates it into a reading of wave heights, frequency, wind speed and direction.
And since I got a phone that's capable of displaying images I've also got the WAM charts and Wind charts for the next five days.
You can check it out on http://www.corksurf.com/wap/
It's actually quite useful for checking the current conditions and has saved me countless hours of driving to and from the beach only to find it flat.
I had also set up a Phonecam for checking the surf. Basically when I arrived at whereever I was going to surf I took a pic with the phone and uploaded it to my site. It didn't really happen because the pictures were of really poor quality and I never felt like taking the pic when I arrived (why draw the crowds on you?)
Still though, it's a fairly cool implementation of mobile web technologies I think.
"hehe, website" - Homer Simpson
...for IRC on my mobile. =P