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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.
well.. actually most of the useful sites to browse from phone are writtin in either html or xhtml-mp, but reachable through 'wap'gateway(important billing wise with some operators)...
with the modern phones any decently put together site is viewable pretty well, as long as the creators weren't too narrow minded.
(though, there was a 'need' for wap, it was to minimize the amount of data needed to transfer and to make the browsers simple/small, however as tech progresses so quickly they should have realised that by the time this thing would catch on it wouldnt be too costly to have a semi-full html browser)
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Check out Vindigo.
An entire Palm application, for $25/year, that does everything you want it to do.
The best $25 I ever spent on my Clie.
It can also do wireless sync'ing, so you can update the information from your Treo easily.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
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.
Google has a WAP proxy. Go to wap.google.com on your cellphone, enter http://slashdot.org/palm as the search term, then select settings and select URL destination, go to the wapalised Slashdot and bookmark that.
At least, thats how I've been reading slashdot for a year or so on my mobile phone.
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.
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
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 also have a Treo 600... while I get pissed occasionally about the load times for a page or the way it is displayed, I can usually fix that just by using the option to not show images or by use wide page mode.
For movies I usually use IMDb.com (they have a text based movie showtimes link) or Moviefone.com Neither are WAP or have wireless pages, but they are loadable and usable on the Treo.
For maps I use mapquest's mobile page: www.mapquest.com/pda It is a barebones page specifically for phones/pdas. Loads fast and has low res maps that are readable. You can also load a map from their normal page to get a high res map and then use wide page mode to see them. The mobile page/site gives directions, too.
For weather, I use "cool weather v2." Google that and it's the first link.
For restaurants, I just know my city well or call a friend. I've used google for that, too. That's the one thing I haven't been able to easily fix. I do occasionally use citysearch, too.
The other option is to use one of the alternate browsers instead of Blazer. They sometimes load faster and look better. The mobile site for Mapquest was a dream come true, though, so I wish the movie sites would implement that.
P.S.
Penny Arcade also has a mobile version of its page with low res version of the comic.
IANAL, but I play one on
Wow, GPRS must be expensive outside the US.
Here in the US, T-Mobile offers unlimited WAP+GPRS for $5 a month. It's not metered by bandwidth or by time, and you can recieve phone calls while you are connected.
For $20, you can get the full-featured "Internet" plan with a real IP (not NAT) and all ports opened.
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.
If your phone can run Opera (Nokia Series 60, SE P800, P900) then it can read pretty much any version of HTML or XHTML.
The disadvantage is that it will download huge images then resize them to fit. That makes it expensive when you're paying for GPRS by the KiloByte. Fortunately if you make a mobile stylesheet you can use CSS3 to selectively replace images with their alt text using img#myimage {content: attr(alt)}