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.

Comments

WAP 1 vs. 2

[SIGALRM]

WAP has such a negative stigma attached to it because that's what carriers marketed several years ago

The stigma is largely a result of the lack of support for WAP 2. Many new phones on the market today support only WAP 1, as well as most of the existing phones already in use.

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.

Slashdot wap page?

[Hobbex]

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!)

Few problems

[usefool]

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.

Set up your own WAP gateway

[Alan Cox]

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.

Slashdot's lite/wap/palm interface

[powdered toast dude]

It doesn't suck, and I typically read /. more from my treo 600 than I do from firefox. But it does need a little help.

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

Re:One more user ..

[csteinle]

It's got less to do with the size of the sceens and more to do with bandwidth. GPRS in real use is still pretty slow, which means lots of big images = bad. Especially as higher broadband penetration means that the "regular internet" gets more and more bandwith intensive.

I use WAP quite a bit. What for? Train times (including how late the train is), cinema times and football scores. None of which really need lots of images. It's cheaper and quicker than getting any of that information over the phone (as in voice).