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WAP is Dead, Long Live WAP

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the ideas-before-their-time dept.

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.

11 of 230 comments (clear)

  1. One more user .. by grazzy · · Score: 5, Funny

    .. and it'll gain another 100%.

    1. Re:One more user .. by panaceaa · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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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      my blog
    2. Re:One more user .. by minginqunt · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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

  2. not dead until... by 5m477m4n · · Score: 5, Funny

    I won't believe it until Netcraft confirms it.

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    Those who can, do
    Those who can't, teach
    Those who don't know how, supervise
  3. My main problem... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

  4. Where's the f'ing CONTENT? by SlashChick · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!
  5. Re:The real reason... by garcia · · Score: 5, Funny

    I have a T-mobile Sidekick/Hiptop and I have always thought of doing that while playing NTN but it's just not fast enough. You are better off guessing or waiting for them to tell you the answer (depending on the game type).

    What wireless net access *is* good for (as explained by a friend) is finalizing drunken bar arguments over stupid shit like "what was the name of the juice that the Gummi Bears drank to make them bounce?" "Gummiberry Juice" is the correct answer in case you were wondering.

    Sadly the bartender wouldn't name a shot after it.

  6. WAP is alive! by Garabito · · Score: 5, Funny

    I think WAP is a very cool and convenient technology, it's the best thing since sliced bread and it lets me

    more...

  7. Re:Slashdot wap page? by eggz128 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  8. The real reason it never took off... by rainman_bc · · Score: 5, Funny

    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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  9. Re:WAP 1 vs. 2 by Greger47 · · Score: 5, Funny
    No, WAP isn't an acronym. It's and onamatopoetic word derived from the sound your phone makes when you throw it at the wall out of frustration...

    /greger