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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.
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.
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.
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I have Small Sites set up as my home page on my Treo, but most of the sites it links to are outdated, toast, or horribly broken.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.)
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(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.
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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.
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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.
Agreed. Can't 42% just be contributed to people accidentally putting their unlocked phones in their pockets, plus the greater adoption of WAP-enabled phones?
I know I end up with 50 cents a month of WAP charges because I do dumb things like that with my new WAP-enabled phone. I've not once purposely gone to a WAP page though.
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The reason it's taking off is that WAP 2.0 has many advantages over the frankly execrable 1.x series.
1.0 was based on WML and a proprietary binary proxying protocol.
2.0 is based on XHTML Basic, TLS and IPv6. So, basically, WAP 2.0 *is* the web for phones.
Also unlike 1.0, 2.0 appears to work, m-Payment included.
And perhaps most crucially, the WAP branding has been completely abandoned. WAP may be broken in people's minds. But "Vodafone LIVE!" and "O2 Zones" "Orange Wirefree Web" all seem to work perfectly. And that's basically what Vodafone et al. call WAP 2.0