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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.
.. and it'll gain another 100%.
I won't believe it until Netcraft confirms it.
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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.
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.
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!)
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
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.
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...
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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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.
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...
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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.
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
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