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Programming IT Technology

WAP Bashing 133

Posted by Hemos from the smash-crack-bushwhack dept.
Tube writes "There's been allot of WAP smack these days, some kicking of the WAP dog when he is down, and even some spitting in the eye of WAP, but it's still moving forward. The Wireless Section of DeveloperWorks is running a feature that tells you where it is and where it's going. XML and WML 2.0: XHTML is giving WAP the fuel to keep it righteous." The feature has some good points; but I still find WAP to be almost entirely useless to me, compared to how it was supposed to have walked my dog, cooked dinner, dry cleaned my t-shirts, cloned me, traded currency derivative and played bridge well. Ah, well, I suppose that's an issue more of hyping then the actual protocol.
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WAP Bashing More

WAP Bashing

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  • Perhaps another case of Marketing driven bloat.
  • I'd just say that there's no "killer app" to rationalize getting this. Originally, I did not get net access for email (back in 96), but since I've had it pretty much continuously since then, I can't imagine being without it.

    Sure, buying stocks from your pda/phone might be cool bragging rights, but really, is it worth it?

    FP?

    • I have to admit I've never seen the point myself, though I don't even own a cell phone.

      Frankly, I think WAP is a very marginal sort of tool, almost exclusively a vertical-market sort of toy. The Wireless Web in general to me seems like no more than some hacker's toy that accidently made it out to the general public; the point of surfing on a cell phone in the first place just about escapes me, since the screen is too small to do anything useful or interesting apart from playing snake or sending messages.

      I do think that there's a place for it, but for the most part it's about as useful as a CueCat.

      /Brian

  • yesterday? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by gavlil ( 255585 )
    wap seems to have just gone away, 12-18 months ago companies couldn't get enough of it and develoers were jumping from html-apps to build these wap things and now most have gone back to html.

    has anyone actually used a wap hone and found it really useful beyond impressing colleguges? IE5.5 is better than a nokia anyway :-)
    • I have a WAP phone (Mitsubishi T250) that I use pretty regularly. I'm not a fan of the phone itself but I get a lot of use out of the wireless internet features. Mainly it's just a big convienence for getting things like phone numbers, addresses, directions, movie showtimes, email, etc. when I'm out. I know there are voice based services for most of the things I use it for, but if I'm doing something like searching through theaters and showtimes I find the WAP approach much easier to navigate and it doesn't use my cell minutes.
      Still, I'll probably be switching to a regular cell phone in the near future just because I've found the Mitsubishi to be such a poor quality phone, and I haven't found any WAP phones that I like.

  • My $0.02 (Score:4, Informative)

    by Wind_Walker ( 83965 ) on Wednesday September 19, 2001 @08:59AM (#2319466) Homepage Journal
    The most common criticisms I tend to hear about wap are of the "Who wants to use the Interent with 4 lines of text" variety. Very few people know what they are actually criticising when it comes to the questions of
    * What is WAP intended to do
    * How does it differ from HTML and
    * How will it improve in the future.

    In my view, WAP is pretty well designed, but it's still early days yet. At it's simplest level, WAP is designed to be a method of presenting content to mobile devices, using the Internet as a carrier medium (my viewpoint). It differs from HTML in that it is a highly slimmed-down markup language, based on XML and including support for various phone functions, such as clicking a link to dial a phone number.

    The more interesting part is perhaps where it will go in the future. Many people point out that it won't take too much extra computing power before your PDA can present HTML as well as a desktop browser. This is all well and good, but it doesn't take into account the extra funtions that are planned for WAP such as location based services, phone functionality etc. These are things that have no place in HTML, so a separate language of some sort is probably the best way to go.

    Personally, I'm investing quite a lot of personal time in WAP with my wap search engine at http://wapwarp.com [wapwarp.com] and a wap developers mailing list http://www.wap-dev.net [wap-dev.net] (hop onboard if you are interested in discussing WAP development with other developers). I am not scared though to imagine that it will be replaced in the future with another standard.

    However it's gonna take a bit for me to hop off the WAP bandwagon. I need to see handsets that support any replacing standard and I need to see a widespread buzz that will attract developers and investors.

    Whatever the case, WAP is certainly helping bridge the gap between the stationary net and the mobile applications of the future - and that is what's so damn exciting about WAP.

    • Re:My $0.02 (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Well, best of luck to you, but I think you are just a bit too biased and on the wrong bandwagon. But, that's just my opinion.

      The main problem with WAP, as I see it, was that it was a case of them (the phone dot com people) wanting to make a bunch of money, so they decided to create a "standard" and thus try to drive demand. Sorta backwards in my opinion. Sadly, a lot of the PCS phone people jumped on board because of the fear of being left behind, and thus the cWAP hype was borne. Despite all of the shortcomings, the norrible nightmare of web developers to try to accomodate all the different "standards" supported by the different browssers plus this WAP cwap, and then add in the fact that it's next to useless on the phone.. well.. it seems that the demand for this product doesn't exist for a good reason. No amount of supply will overcome a horrible idea.

      Take a look at the way the Europeans have addressed their wireless devices and you will see they are light years ahead of the US. Probably because they don't spin their wheels and waste their time with bad ideas like WAP.

      Anyways, best of luck to you.
      • Take a look at the way the Europeans have addressed their wireless devices and you will see they are light years ahead of the US. Probably because they don't spin their wheels and waste their time with bad ideas like WAP.

        I actually thought European companies brought forth WAP, but i could be wrong on that one. However, Ericsson, Nokia, Siemes, and other big European players are still coming out with WAP phones and touting the technology, although perhaps not with the same magnitude of hype as two years ago.

        There are also people out investing time and resources in producing WAP services. Take a look at BioWAP [www.uta.fi] for instance! (I have heard that it is pretty easy to set up a WAP service though.)

        What you claim is a main problem is nothing less than the regular course of tech business in general, and has certainly been done before in the telecom business. One can argue that GSM was created that way (although apparently there also were practical needs behind the standard), and certainly SMS was created before there was demand!

        • I have heard that it is pretty easy to set up a WAP service though.

          Well, basicaly here is what you need to run wap server:


          1. at least quite ordinary server
          2. internet connection

          But if you want to take full advantage of WAP features (like authentification or encryption) you have to either be a GSM operator or you have to make a deal with one and either setup dedicated connection (not TCP/IP but dedicated "phone" line with special modem AFAIK) to theire WAP gateway or setup your own WAP gateway with alike dedicated connection to GSM operator. If you do that, you (i.e. your users) are limited to WAP phones are set to use your WAP gateway otherwise all resources deployed for more features are lost.

      • Europe probably had WAP phones long before the US (from Q2 2000), and there are still a lot out there - however, very few people use them, due to poor usability, terrible implementations (many sites just can't be accessed due to browser or WAP gateway bugs), and unexciting content.

        WAP may be slightly improved by adopting GPRS, which allows an always-on connection to the Net, but it is still fundamentally a pain to use. WAP 2.0 may improve things a bit, as it is closer to NTT's i-mode model of using standard TCP/IP connections (as an option) rather than buggy WAP gateways, and also can use XHTML not just WML. But don't hold your breath - PDAs and HTTP/TCP may be a better way to go.
        • I have an Ericsson T39, GPRS, WAP. WAP is perfect for its intended use.


          Yes, WAP has no place without a packet-based always-on connection. GPRS is here now though, and so's WAP.


          I'm in Europe, of course. The USA is _way_ back when it comes to cellphone technology ... (I'm also using the Bluetooth in my phone, something I see regularly bashed here)

    • I think as well people need to realize the market WAP is, and has been, aimed at. We are talking about consumer devices (GSM phones generally) that cost (subsidized) about US$50 at the low end. There is no way you are going to be able to get a HTML microbrowser into this type of device at this price point.

      WAP's purpose in life is to present small pieces of information, and subsets of interactivity, to people using these sorts of devices. WAP is not meant to replace your favorite browser on your favorite PC OS. That people ever thought this was the case was due to massive overhyping from the mobile industry. All players share some responsibility, but I believe the majority goes to the network operators (hello BT Cellnet) that wowed us with the idea of surfing the Internet on your mobile phone.

    • I don't need WAP....Don't misunderstand me: I tried it, my cell phone is WAP enabled and for kicks I tried it once or twice. I saw no use at all. Especially because I have an alternative, let me explain: Psion Revo+ with Opera browser for EPOC and infrared connection to my cellphone. Basic email, with header downloading (so I don't have to wait for huge attachments)? Check! Slashdot with images and all? Check! What more do I need?
      Okay, the speed is not really on par with dialup. It is quite expensive too, I admit that, but I can use any regular ISP that supports dialup. A bit more than 0.12 € per minute is fair while on the move or during emergencies. This morning for example they shut down our internet connection (because of the Nimda worm) and I checked slashdot + my mail (with an attachment of about 300K,...important document...) in about 10 minutes. As far as I checked, WAP costs about the same for less functionality.

      So I think that you have to expect that, with the raise of the processing power you predict, you will see PDA/Cellphone integrations with real browsers that cope with real ISP's. I don't think that situation will be far off, since right now I do it with two devices. No more WAP needed, it has become obsolete.
      It is quite disappointing that you didn't elaborate on the extra functionalities that WAP offers except the "click to dail a number" thing. I would have been interested to *know* what I'm missing. (Because click to dial...well, ehm...doens't sound very usefull to me, just annoying).

    • * How does it differ from HTML and

      While this is a fair questions, I'd like to point out that a fairer way to state it is: How does WAP (w/ WML) differ from TCP/IP w/HTML.

      WAP specifies much more than just the mark-up language, though that mark-up language is all that probably 90% of developers interface with. As the many articles point out, the WML in WAP2.0 will be based on XHTML-basic so WML and HTML will have met again.

      WAP the networking protocol is much better suited to a wireless environment than TCP/IP. In some cases TCP/IP in wireless networks can be counterproductive. For example, TCP could interpret high-latency as congestion and send fewer packets. If the latency isn't due to congestion but to, say, a signal bouncing around between buildings and coming in and out of communication, then fewer packets equals more useless waiting around (packets aren't being dropped, they're just slow), which adds up to decreased performance. WAP the protocol tries to work around things like this.
    • Yes WAP is well designed and great for providing those snippets of information that you need
      Noboby uses it

      Fortran 90 is the fastest and best language for mathematical modelling
      Nobody uses it

      Why I hear you ask?
      1) In both cases there exists something that is a little bit slower or incovinient, but much easier and cheaper for a novice to use
      Fortran --> mathcad / C++
      WAP --> newspaper / radio /phone

      2) Everybody thinks it is crap or obsolite, the result being that those that might have a use for it ignore it

      3) People who do use it get discouraged and critisise it when they try using it for something inapropriate. (A bit like entering the great shark in the dune buggey race)

      WAP like fortran has a time and a place

    • including support for various phone functions, such as clicking a link to dial a phone number

      Except that the state of the art is such that "clicking a link to dial a phone number" is a browser-specific function, which nobody really wants to use. No-one really wants to go back to the days of the IE-Netscape wars.

      the extra funtions that are planned for WAP such as location based services, phone functionality etc.

      Once again, you're more or less right, erring on finer points of detail. Let me put it this way:

      - WAP is a protocol. It should be compared to HTTP. Purists will go as far as saying that WAP goes further than HTTP (and that is where the real criticism of WAP is, technically speaking), but let's keep things simple.

      - WML is the language used for describing content (pages) in WAP. It can be compared to HTML.
      WML does not support positioning services. That is just not where positioning fits in.

      About positioning, by the way: again, the implementations are pretty dependant on phones and operators. There are at least two "standards" (LAS and MPS). Support is very vague at this time. As far as I know, it isn't defined as part of WAP -- it fits more into the GSM / GPRS / UMTS space since you position phones whether they are on a WAP session or not.

      The real point of WML, language-wise, is to fit in phone-specific functionality, such as programmable function keys, contextual menus, and limited interaction. Phones usually have very small screens? WML uses a card-and-deck metaphor to optimize information presentation to the user.

      A lot of thought has been put in designing WML1.x, and it is IMO a shame to let it go to waste... for what it's worth, I'd prefer for the web to be written in WML rather than HTML, since the language is designed to put the focus on the actual information and user interaction rather than on presentation. Typically, the WML equivalent of HTML forms (WML variables) is much more flexible and powerful...

      However, the consensus among the public is that "HTML is better". So WAP goes HTML (XHTML, actually). It's a shame; but so long it pays my salary...

      By the way, the real problem about WML is that the specification does not dict browser rendition. For instance, the <p> tag defines a "paragraph" as in HTML; it is left to the browser to decide whether to put a blank line before it or not (to the best of my knowledge, only the Microsoft Pocket Explorer browser does this, which is the reason why so many sites are ugly on phones using this browser -- Sony springs to mind). This is a very serious problem since WAP developers have to extensively test their code on as many mobile devices as they can... and getting a WAP phone is slightly more expensive than downloading a web browser.

      Just my SEK0.02...

    • The more interesting part is perhaps where it will go in the future. Many people point out that it won't take too much extra computing power before your PDA can present HTML as well as a desktop browser. This is all well and good, but it doesn't take into account the extra funtions that are planned for WAP such as location based services, phone functionality etc. These are things that have no place in HTML, so a separate language of some sort is probably the best way to go.

      Absolutely. In fact, a Palm or newer cell phone can do a decent job as an HTML browser. Remember that you don't need a 1ghz P3 to run Lynx or your favorite text browser. The real issue would then become getting the data to the wireless device. Existing and future wireless data transfer technology has enough bandwidth to support decent text based web browsing.

      The more interesting part is perhaps where it will go in the future. Many people point out that it won't take too much extra computing power before your PDA can present HTML as well as a desktop browser. This is all well and good, but it doesn't take into account the extra funtions that are planned for WAP such as location based services, phone functionality etc. These are things that have no place in HTML, so a separate language of some sort is probably the best way to go.

      I don't buy it at all. HTML is the data, not how it is interfaced to the device. The browser should adapt to the device, not the data itself.

      This is like saying, lets build a new language for every variation we come across of the same problem. It doesn't make any sense.

      Stick with developing HTML based content, WAP is not going anywhere. By the time it is ready for prime time, we will have devices that can surf the REAL web.

      Take care,

      Brian
      100% Linux Based Hosting - 100% Code Red Worms Free [assortedinternet.com]

    • My problem with WAP is really with WML -- I understand its goal, which is to build a language that strips out all of the unsupported features, and leaves room to add new phone-specific ones, but why do it in a way that makes it incompatible with the millions of web pages already in existence?

      Yes, there are pages with crazy Flash intros that I wouldn't expect to work, but it seems to me if I can browse a simple web page with simple text-based browser like Lynx, there is no reason why my phone should not be able to browse that exact same page without giving me a "this page didn't compile correctly" error.

      If you ask me, DoCoMo's cHTML is a much better way to go -- AFAIK, it's simply a subset of HTML. Meaning that if I've got a simple HTML page (and even if it contains features that get stripped out), I can view it on my Palm browser AND my DoCoMo phone without having to create two different versions. Want to add phone-specific features? Great! Add them to the cHTML spec and guess what, it still won't break the HTML pages that are already out there.

      Don't get me wrong -- I'm sure there are probably reasons why WML is better than a stripped-down HTML. But given how many HTML pages already exist that would be useful to view on a phone, it boggles my mind there had to be such a rift between the two languages.

    • I still don't see what the 'big deal' with WAP is. I mean, hell, go back a decade, and we had this great little thing called 'gopher'.

      Plain and simple thing is, it worked. Then people put out clients like 'TurboGopher' which would launch external apps, so you could view pictures. Then someone came up with this 'HTML' concept, where we could make whole pages of pictures.

      Shortly after, we end up with 'NCSA Mosiac', and then that parasite 'Mozilla', hogging 4 simultaneous connections for each page request. Shortly after, some prick comes up with the 'let's sell the crap I make in my garage' concept, and we end up with folks buying up every '.com' address (back in the days when it was $100 for 2 years), and businesses suing them to get the domains with their name in 'em, so that they can try to sell more crap that we don't want.

      All the while, people give up on usenet, and move towards 'message boards' like this thing I'm posting on right now, and they trade in IRC for ICQ and AIM, and their muds for MMRPGs [which well, compared to some of the decade old muds out there, was a massive step backwards].

      So...in the end, you have to ask yourself... is WAP solving a problem that anyone actually had? For the most part, nope, it's just that people have forgotten about that great thing called gopher, which well....worked.

      WAP will probably come and force all new kinds of traffic on the internet, so that the folks still trying to post on message board web pages that WAP, IM and MMRPGs are sucking down all of the bandwidth, so they're lagging while trying to post. {Just like I did, when I'd bitch about damned web surfers wasting bandwidth while I'm trying to mud)

      um....for those who can't tell -- I'm mostly joking...the real reason that WAP sucks is the same reason that HTTP sucked in the early days, and why people kept using gopher -- gopher was better organized. It took folks like Yahoo [which now sucks ass] and Digital [altavista] to come up with some good ways of finding information.

      It's going to take some better marketing, and some user interface testing for folks to realize that we don't want to take 10 min and click through 20 some pages to get someone's phone number, when we can just call information, and even if we might have been able to do it faster, we don't have the time to dedicate to learn some new system of menus and crap like that. [Hell, I'm getting pretty good at getting through all of the menus to get to my voicemail at work, but it took me a couple of weeks to not use the patterns that I use for my cell phone voicemail]
    • This post is a karmawhoring rip-off! The proof is here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=6429&cid=95196 2 [slashdot.org] a post I made over a year ago when the opinions expressed here made more sense!

      Gah! What's galling is that the karma-whoring worked, the guy got modded up to 4 points anyway! Oh well, no damage done!

  • /. and WAP (Score:2, Informative)

    by NRLax27 ( 123692 )
    Oddly enough I was just trying to access /. through a wireless card in my iPaq. Although in the FAQ, CmdrTaco claims that if I visit the site in a WAP compliant browser, I should see a WAP version of the page, it just doesn't happen. And the regular page is too busy to read on a small screen (in fact, scrolling is extremely slow). Instead of the auto-detect feature, I like what WebTender [webtender.com] is doing...they have a seperate URL for WAP browsers, wap.webtender.com [webtender.com]. Using a seperate URL in conjunction with an "autodetect" feature seems to be the best way for a site to go.
    • One of the problems with WAP is standardisation. Sure, there's the official standard but if you write pages that conform then most devices won't display it properly (or at all).

      It's kind of like writing web pages and having to write custom stuff for IE and Netscape, but far worse. As pretty much the first machine available, many sites only work properly on a Nokia 7110 (think the numbers right :)

      This is the experience we had this time last year; I can't imagine that things have changes much in that time. The WAP part of the site never went live partially because of these problems.
    • I have found his also. /. WAP just doesn't work at all, not on my phone, or htorugh a WAP emulator.
  • I have a wap phone (a siemens s35i) and I must say, ehre in the Netherlands I have found the wap phone quite handy. It enabled me to check if there were any traffic jams on the roads, wether the trains were on time (no!) and it was also very handy to keep up to date with the news, especially in the light of the recent tragic events.
    • I have a Nokia 7110 (the one with the big WAP screen) and here in Madrid and it's essentially useless.

      1) It's too slow. A 10 minute taxi ride should be enough to check my email, but I've just barely logged in when I arrive at my destination.

      2) It costs the same as making a regular phone call, so while waiting for a 9600 baud connection to retrieve it's 2k of text (the biggest GSM networks will allow over the SMS carrier) I'm paying through the nose.

      I tried. I really did, I bought the big WAP phone and everything, got excited, made my WAP home page, etc. but it's just pretty useless. I agree that to not be able to view the millions of HTML pages already in use is a waste.

      While I'm on a tear, developing in XML is hell. It's worse than it seems - a missed bracket or an included ñ that you forgot to strip out and the whole page breaks.

      -Russ
  • I tried WAP.

    It failed me.

    Maybe I asked too much? I doubt it. I've still yet to find a half-decent WAP Email provider that can give you a decent, free and fast email service that doesn't literally take you 10 minutes to write a 20 word email.. Do I think it'll take off? No. Maybe G3 will? Who knows.. Too many technologicial flops and licensing drama's of late..
    • Hmmm..

      Since I run my own domain, it should be easy for me to write pages that allow me to check my mail remotely through WAP if I ever get one of those things. Right now I just ssh into the home lan and use pine.

      But I don't even own a regular cell phone, nor do I want to, so I guess it's a moot point...until I get a truly wireless palm that can also use standard 802.11 so it can hop on my network at home, and not use somebody else's network...

    • Wap for text messages? (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      SMS is fine for texting. I don't want dozens of crappy spam emails sent to my phone thank you very much. If companies send me phone spam I have the option of suing them big time, which I don't with email.

      With web-like content, I find it handy for rail timetables - I just enter my start and end locations and it works out the best connections.

      HTML pages are nowhere near useable enough for WAP sites - they need to be made especially.

      Unfortunately railtrack's WAP site dies on the final page now (aargh!). Do I blame them, my telco or Nokia? I guess I need a firmware upgrade.

  • The protocol was great (is great) for sending messages that you don't care if anyone else sees.

    The two main problems I had with it were 1) the devices it was used on tended to have screens just slightly larger than my thumb - which again is perfectly fine if you want to send and display a message that says "you suck balls" to your friend in LA, but if you want to render out a page, then it looks god awful and you have to use short words. and then 2) it isn't secure at all, and it is slow... I guess that's really 3 there.

    I work for a company that sells telcom software and I was given the task of porting an entire e-commerce site over to WAP - in about 2 weeks - which I did. but it was total idiocy - the number of forms and pages you had to go through was stupid and then it wasn't secure.

    the only real good use of it was if you registered on the web via a computer, and then wanted to do small updates to your account via your handheld (buy more mins, recharge a pin, see your bill status).
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Wireless 'net access won't really take off until phones start offering real web browsing with, like, actual HTML support. But once that happens, people will realize that HTML isn't ideal for this, and little by little sites will start offering WAP-optimized versions to improve the user experience a little on small devices. WAP will take off only once it is no longer required to access the web on a mobile. At least, that's my prediction :-).

      (Suggestion: use some proxy such as Betsie [bbc.co.uk] to bash ordinary web pages into a form suitable for small devices.)

      • Re:What is the point of WAP? (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        >Suggestion: use some proxy such as Betsie....

        ..or use wap.google.com, which does similar,
        but better and actually useful.

        MR
    • WAP is an attempt made by Nokia and Ericsson to create a proprietary protocol on top of html.
      Why do something the easy way when it's possible to
      make it different and control the standard?
      I've worked for Ericsson and most of my current colleagues have worked for Ericsson.
  • When is Slashdot going to be available on WAP anyway? Is it already? It hasn't come up on my phone when I've tried.

    It would be nice to get the list of headlines and be able to select the headline I want to see the main story. Reading through comments could be more tedious, but doable with a little UI work.

    WAP is a great way to check your E-mail on the road too, if you don't have a PDA to hook up to.

    • When is Slashdot going to be available on WAP anyway? Is it already? It hasn't come up on my phone when I've tried. It would be nice to get the list of headlines and be able to select the headline I want to see the main story.

      I don't mean to sound like a wag, but it should be fairly easy to roll your own WAP Slashdot headline deal. Here's how I would do it.

      1. Go to dyndns.org and set up a account there. Point it at your cable modem/DSL/whatever. If you have a domain somewhere else where you can exert full (or near-full) control over the web server, then you can use that.

      2. Set up your machine to grab RDF headlines [slashdot.org]. You only really need a one-liner:
        perl -MLWP::Simple -e 'getprint "http://slashdot.org/slashdot.rdf"'

      3. Parse and arrange the headlines however you like. Group them by category perhaps. Add something that grabs sports scores and market numbers maybe.

      4. Set up Apache to send out WAP-enabled "pages" when your phone comes calling.

      Of course, I don't know squat about WAP, so all that is just off the top of my head...

      -B

      • Yes, it would be quite possible to do that, except that it would require postprocessing that would require more time than I have for such a project. I'm told a simple WAP interface already exists; the tools at PyWeb [pyweb.com] should let you see it.

    • Re:Slashdot on WAP (Score:2, Interesting)

      by robertito ( 80580 )
      Try this url:

      http://wmlproxy.google.com/h=en/g=@26amp@3bwmlmo de =url/u=slashdot.org@2Fpalm

      this uses Google's html2wml filter to give all the functional goodness of slashdot's Palm Pilot offering (including the top ten comments with each story) in a reasonable WML format.
  • Trading currency derivatives is one place, at least, where WAP has succeeded. Check E-gold [e-gold.com][e-gold.com] for their WAP client [e-gold.com][pcs.e-gold.com]. This allows you to do E-gold spends and also check your account from a PCS or WAP enabled phone.

    I was impressed when I saw that, as I had previously thought WAP was simply vapour.
  • I use it all the time.. mostly to get my slashdot fix and check my email.. but slashdot wml generator is a buggy piece of garbage that usually returns content that's not to the standard and my phone can't display it.. Maybe I'll have to rewrite it for them. :)

  • WAP could have been cool (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Salsaman ( 141471 ) on Wednesday September 19, 2001 @09:15AM (#2319540) Homepage
    I worked on an application for IBM, which would have allowed people to pay for goods in shops using just a WAP phone - no need to carry cash or credit cards around any more. The money would be transferred instantly, and the shop would straight away receive an email informing them that the transaction had gone through.

    However, it never got past the demo stage, I think because banks were worried about upsetting the card companies. It's a shame really, I thought that could have been a killer app for WAP.

    • I've thought about this too - I think it's a brilliant idea. It would be much more convenient than credit cards.

      Aside from that, there are all sorts of ways you could automate this. For example, at a restaurant you give the server your phone number. The cash register automagically sends your bill to you by SMS message, then you respond to the message to pay. (I'm not sure this really needs WAP, the point for me is to be able to use your phone rather than some sort of smart card).

      Same thing with toll highways and the cell-phone positioning systems that are now available. As you enter the highway you get a notification. If you want to pay for the ride you respond to the notification. At the exit a very small "cell" notices when a car passes without having paid (ie. there's a car here, but none of the cell-phones inside have accepted payment) and takes a picture (or sets of lights so the cops notice).

      Eventually you could take it to extremes and sell movie tickets, plane tickets, etc. this way. As you approach a gate, it opens if you (or rather, your cell phone) has purchased a valid ticket.

    • You don't need wap for that. Allready there are several vending machines that accept payment via cellphone.

      You just send a SMS message to a number listed on the vending machine with content describing what you want and the machine dipenses this. You are charged on the phone bill.
      • That's interesting, but there's probably a reason why it's only used on vending machines - if you lose your phone, it would take a very long time to drain your account by buying stuff from a vending machine !

        The system I was working on could handle much larger transactions, and thus had to be protected by a pin number - in other words, you were actually running an application on the bank's servers rather than sending an SMS message.

      • Yes, that's really convenient - just dial a 10 digit number, and probably authenticate as well for larger purchases, and you've paid for something! Much easier than simply taking out your credit card and having the assistant swipe it through the machine...

        Perhaps Bluetooth-enabled phones could be used for payment, but anything involving the user typing more than a 4 digit PIN is a non-starter.

  • WAP and no net access (Score:2, Interesting)

    by oops ( 41598 )
    Since my client's corporate firewall/proxy was shut down this morning following the NIMBA virus attack, I've found the ability to read my Yahoo mail via Mobile Yahoo [yahoo.com] on my WAP phone very useful indeed. I wouldn't/couldn't compose or reply using this (given a 10-key keypad), but to simply check whether there's anything important it was invaluable. Another pain is continually entering the username/password combination. Doesn't WAP/WML support cookies ?


    I-Mode looks a lot better. Check out this Wired article [wired.com] from last month.

    • I've had great success checking e-mail with my Nokia 8810 and TRGpro. I recommend the Eudora e-mail client.

      The only annoyance is the IR connection, which basically means you have to do the send and check on a desk. Bring on a Bluetooth solution for my TRGpro (I already have the Bluetooth kit for my Ericsson T28).

  • WAP 2.0 Shows promise (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Having see an internal IBM presentation on WAP 2.0 in February I think WAP2 shows real promise. Especially if you think of it as a step towards another version of WAP. Moving to XHTML Basic, ECMAScript, TCP/IP and other REAL standards shows a real willing to move towards an open way of working. I really think that htis is a step in the right direction and people should be kind to WAP 2.0 without prejudicing it becasuse of WAP 1's deficiencies.
  • I rather prefer a palmpilot + cell phone combo to a wap enabled phone, ok it's cumbersome, but you can do a lot more, I fell kind of inprisoned when trying to do something in a Wap phone. To me that's one a the major problems with wap or some other dumb protocol, all the apliances tend to use just the basic stuff. I mean if there wasn't wap maybe they could have something like a pilot-cell phone working already... (don't like the nokia, no software for it)
  • I don't know about anybody else, but I frequently use Yahoo Mail's WAP interface to check my email on my cellphone. It's very useful. I suppose that it's useful to day-traders out there to get up-to-the second stock prices, but those people are boneheads, anyway.
  • My problem with WAP is the daggoned flaming hoops I have to go through to develop WAP applications. For example, the Palm . Yes, you get the emulator up-front and free. But to make the emulator useful, I have to sign up for Development Resources Seeding Program to get ROM images. This includes snail mail, as exampled in the e-mail they sent me:

    If you did not download the legal agreement in PDF format, please do so now by returning to the signup page in the Provider Pavilion. You must sign and return TWO (2) copies of legal agreement. (Faxes will not be accepted). Please allow 2 weeks to process your documentation.

    So unless I've got a burning project, forget about doing this stuff as a hobby, or in my case, for a charity I'm involved with. I'll just go install some Open Source groupware product with minimal WAP capabilities.
    • Nokia had a free WAP development kit available yonks ago when I cared. And you can get the Palm ROMs from any Palm using freely downloadable apps without having to post off the form.

  • WAP porn? (Score:3, Funny)

    by artemis67 ( 93453 ) on Wednesday September 19, 2001 @09:30AM (#2319609)
    The most prevalent application for WAP is porn [zdnet.com]... My goodness, how desparate are these people for sexual gratification that tiny 1-bit images of nekkid women gets them off?
  • The trade press uses a hype / bash cycle to attract readers and sell
    advertising. Think about the headlines you've seen on WAP, Java, or
    for that matter Linux. WAP is an emerging technology - first gen
    wireless Web enabled phones have limited display areas and limited
    input capabilities. By analogy, think back to 1994, and browsers
    like "Mosaic", "Cello", and "Netscape 0.92". Then take a look at
    what's being currently coming to market - Kyocera has a very nice
    phone that combines a phone with a Palm, Nokia has phones that open
    up to reveal larger color screens and small keyboards. WAP is
    evolving and adding functionality. And companies are developing real
    and useful applications for these devices. Wireless devices are not
    going to replace the Web anytime soon (probably never). They will
    supplement the Web, particularly dealing with time-sensitive data
    and transactions. Wireless devices are well suited for handling
    time-sensitive information and tasks. For consumers, think
    financial and travel related transactions. For businesses, think of
    technical data, sales information, and messaging to employees in the
    field. Neither WAP, nor any technology will live up to it's early
    hype in the trade press. But I think wireless devices and WAP will
    grow, evolve, and find important mainstream applications.

    Bob Platt
    Senior Architect
    CheckFree Corp.
  • WAP Push is a new feature in V1.2(?) of the specs that allows WAP pages to be pushed out to (willing) subscibers. This will make WAP _very_ usable.

    Think about the issues now. Finding a page, typing in usernames/passwords, searching for content, and finally buying the goods...what a nightmare on current browsers with only a 9 digit keypad. If I could sign up for content I wanted on my phone and it pushed it out to me when it had updated info with a url embedded in the message that took me to exactly the page I wanted to view and allow me to action that in one or 2 clicks, then I would be happy.

    Case in point: There are a bunch on bands I want to see in London but I can't be bothered checking the listings everyday and when I do finally find a band I want to see its normally an impulse buy. I would much rather it just sent a WAP page to my phone with a link back to a site where I could buy tickets right then. perfect.

    Which also brings me onto the point that half the reason current WAP useage sucks is that the UI's that are being designed suck and require way to many clicks to get to the content you want. Also the Telcos are not making it easy enough for users to set up their WAP hoimepages and provide great content.
  • There is really nothing badly wrong with WAP. The protocol itself is quite good, it just needs to "mature" a little bit.
    The problem itself is in the WAP browsers (being "non-standardized"), the phones (too small displays) and the cellphone nets (just too darn slow and expensive).
    The phones (getting more "PDA:ish") will get bigger displays, and the connection speeds will improve, eventually. But until then, it doesn't seem that useful. I'd really like a good WAP email service (which could be used with what's available today), but I've yet to see one.
    • There is really nothing badly wrong with WAP. The protocol itself is quite good, it just needs to "mature" a little bit. The problem itself is in the WAP browsers (being "non-standardized"), the phones (too small displays) and the cellphone nets (just too darn slow and expensive).

      Umm... wasn't the whole point of WAP to address those latter two issues?

  • I *only* use WAP for sports scores (Score:3, Interesting)

    by deepstephen ( 149398 ) on Wednesday September 19, 2001 @09:47AM (#2319640)
    I have a Nokia 6210 and I've hardly used WAP at all. Except for one thing.

    I go to football matches (that's soccer to you Americans) with my Dad every weekend, and it's great to be able to stand in the middle of the stadium and find out the scores from all the other matches in the league at half-time and full-time. Everyone around me always listens in while I read the scores out.

    Previously we used to have to find someone with a radio while we were leaving the stadium, and strain to hear what was going on, and make sure we didn't lose them in the crowd. This is a big improvement on that, and it's a really killer feature of WAP. The only problem I can see is that because everyone wants to know the scores at the same time, the one decent WAP scores service gets slashdotted at 4.45 every Saturday afternoon! :)
      • it's great to be able to stand in the middle of the stadium and find out the scores from all the other matches in the league [...] Previously we used to have to find someone with a radio while we were leaving the stadium [...] the one decent WAP scores service gets slashdotted at 4.45 every Saturday afternoon

      Would it be a stupid question to ask what's wrong with a phone with a built in FM radio, the Motorolla V2282 or equivelant? This is what broadcast media is made for. :)

    • Previously we used to have to find someone with a radio while we were leaving the stadium,

      Are your stadiums shielded against radio waves? Here people have been going to the stadium with a miniradio in their pockets for years.
    • You don't need WAP for that. There are plenty of SMS-based services that will send out scores. Set and forget.

      This is in fact the main problem for WAP -- almost everything it does can be done almost as well by something else. Something else that most people who care already have, like SMS (or in the case of road tolls, radio tags and/or bar codes).

      My mobile phone has an MP3 add-on and I use that all the time (every weekday lunch time plus whenever I'm on a bus).

  • Face it, the only thing that will ever be able to walk your dog, cook dinner, dry clean your t-shirts, clone you, trade currency derivative and play bridge well is Emacs.

    WAP ain't shite, it's just not what the marketdroids say it is... but then again, is anything?
  • If pages had been well coded from the start, with good HTML and good metadata, proper separation of content from presentation and all that, I think access to the full web from cell phones would have been great.

    Obviously, nobody wants to use a service that has so little features as WAP, but if you could actually access the whole web, it would have been great. But it would require people to code for device independence.

  • ...compared to how it was supposed to have walked my dog, cooked dinner, dry cleaned my t-shirts, cloned me, traded currency derivative and played bridge well

    Don't forget that much of the big WAP PR occurred in 1999 and 2000, during the dot-com goldrush. Back then, every technology carried such far-fetched promises.

  • Kill WAP now! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dublin ( 31215 ) on Wednesday September 19, 2001 @10:28AM (#2319829) Homepage
    WAP isn't just stupid, it's a bad thing: At it's core, it's very important to recognize that WAP is nothing less than an attempt to replace all open standard Internet protocols with proprietary (and not particularly well-designed) W-equivalents.

    There is absolutely no reason why standard HTML, HTTP, and TCP can't work in the wireless world - WAP is a waste of time and money, these protocols aren't necessary today (except for terminally crippled cellphone browsers that people generally refuse to use), and as handheld devices gain more compute power, they start to need the real protocols anyway, so WAP is more of a hindrance than a help.

    Oh, and there's that whole ugly proprietary problem, too.. Sadly, WAP is the OSI of this decade. It too will yield to the unstoppable juggernaut of open Internet protocols, but not before countless millions of dollars and man-hours are spent trying to force another bad idea on the world.

    If you're not familiar with OSI, go back and read about it - OSI was a suite of "elegant" protocols (as opposed to the crude but effective IP) that most of the academics and digerati viewed as "the right way" to do networking in the 80's and 90's. There was one problem they overlooked: IP worked well and was interoperable, OSI could claim niether of these attributes. Marshall Rose has written that OSI can be quite instructive in illustrating the way things should NOT be done.

    I think the same is very much true of WAP. The death of WAP, when it finally comes, will be a good thing.
    • written that OSI can be quite instructive in illustrating the way things should NOT be done.

      I HATE OSI. I did the CCNA and we had to learn this stupid thing. I can still see the seven layers... Actually, Cisco used it to illustrate how networking works! Only to tell us afterwards that it's not used anywhere. That was so frustrating.
      • David Clark of MIT told me first-hand that the only reason there are seven layers in the OSI model is because there were seven subcommittees sent off to study the problem - when they came back together, in true ISO fashion, they couldn't agree on where the layer divisions should be, so they just stuck with the arbitrary divisions of the subcommittees themselves. Ugh.
    • I disagree. I work on digital tv platforms where the client is _really_ thin. HTML is better for layout, certainly, but in comparison to WML, which has just turned up on Sky digital, it's slow and heavy. For a thin client (and I'm talking about a 386 with up to 4MB ram here), WML is a lot more suitable.

      Don't get me wrong; I'm not particularly fond of it, and I don't think it's got anywhere near the power of the good ol' DHTML/javascript combo, but if you're talking about the sort of platforms it was developed for, it is, IMHO, definitely better than HTML.

      Now all we need is a mobile with a 1024*768 screen...
      • HTML is better for layout, certainly, but in comparison to WML, which has just turned up on Sky digital, it's slow and heavy.
        But HTML doesn't need to be "heavy"! You can make skinny pages, you can make heavy pages, but no one forces you to make heavy pages if you don't want to!

        Some time ago, I looked at some "historical" HTML documents. Really simple HTML from the earliest days of the web. Still renders just fine on modern browsers, and would probably look just fine on "thin" environments...

        There are web browsers that run on Commodore 64 - all the way up from TCP/IP stack to HTML to formatting... That's a thin client for you!

        • But HTML doesn't need to be "heavy"! You can make skinny pages, you can make heavy pages, but no one forces you to make heavy pages if you don't want to!
          Right; but HTML is heavy in another sense: the code size and processing power required to parse and render HTML is huge. Huge, that is, for the low-power cpu in a mobile device.

          To use HTML, a mobile device would have to limit itself to some arbitrary subset, which is bad because every device manufacturer would choose a different subset. To standardize on an XHTML subset actually sounds like a good idea.

          There are web browsers that run on Commodore 64 - all the way up from TCP/IP stack to HTML to formatting... That's a thin client for you!

          I'm sure those web browsers are great as long as you stick to the particular HTML subset that they can handle well. And I'm sure they suck when you don't.

          /A

      • I've done set-top box work, too, and agree they're some of the thinnest clients you'll find. (Although this thinness is more an artifact of the cable industry's bizarre business model (which has no way to accomodate the user buying better hardware if he wants it) than it is any real architectural requirement.

        I've been through this argument with many of the big names in the cable and satellite business. Any set-top that weak is not going to be worth buying in the first place, as it will be insufficiently flexible in the future. We sure don't need Pentium IV set-tops, but we do need something that isn't obsolete when it hits the market. And "thinness", I'd argue is more a property of the platform (hw & sw) than the protocols.

        The economics don't even work - Moore's law pretty much demands that throwing hardware at the problem is cheaper in the long run than developing goofy proprietary protocols.
    • TCP cannot work great in the wireless world. It was designed from the ground up assuming that losing a connection is the exception, not the norm. TCP Tahoe/Reno (Congestion Control) and basic networking concepts like SAR (segmentation and reassembly) and sliding window are quite different in a world where you might lose your connection for a few seconds every minute or two, versus TCP which assumes >99% uptime.

      TTCP, another standard, is better suited for wireless than TCP, but alas, it isn't natively supported by most OS's.

      WTP really is better suited than TCP. Also, WDP is defined to be the same as UDP for bearers supporting TCP, but what about protocols like SMS that are not TCP based? WDP provides a clean abstraction for sending datagrams when TCP/UDP/IP are not present.

      HTTP is also poorly suited for wireless (3G is still a ways off). The headers are large and verbose, thus very inefficient. WSP is a good substitute for HTTP because instead of having sending twenty or so bytes to send "Content-Type: text/html" you send a single byte.

      Where WAP sucks is WML. WML is currently overly restrictive and doesn't let you get the rich layout that HTML gives you. WML 2.0 will alleviate a lot of these problems, but I think in general, when most people say things like "WAP Sucks", they are referring to the quality of the underlying network, the small screen size on phones (there are several WAP browsers for PDA's), or the limitations of WML.
      • I agree that protocols should be different to accomodate intermittent connections, but WAP went way overboard in thier approach. If they had only set out to provide a more reliable datagram delivery layer, thet wouldn't have been so bad.

        WTP is better, but is it enough better to justify adding a terribly proprietary and unproven protocol as part of the infrastructure? Probably not, especially since the reliability of the underlying wireless transport can reasonably be expected to get much better in the 3G world we'll actually be using this stuff in...

        HTTP is simply a poorly designed protocol, period. Wireless or not, it's an ungainly pig. (The Gopher protocol is a much better design, and there were those of us pushing for it or others as alternatives to HTTP when Mosaic first came out. It was quickly too late, though, and we've been stuck with a turkey ever since.

        And WML, as you state, is pretty much without any redeeming qualities whatsoever...
  • The WAP "Standard" is closed and uses proprietary technology. There are efforts underway to develop truly open alternatives. http://www.freeprotocols.org/wapTrap/ [freeprotocols.org]

  • With a good artist and writer you can have a popular comic on WAP, Flip&Mick has been around for 400+ episodes so far and you can check it out with WAP phone/browser at (Remember IE is not a WAP browser):

    http://wap.movingentertainment.com/hosted/flipmick /nokia/ [movingentertainment.com]

  • I never hated WAP, like most people. I just saw it as a cheap easy way to get essential information. Perhaps WAP will get overtaken by some other protocol - so be it. For now it gets me the daily news when I'm on the bus or the John.

    However, one use is particularly useful right now, in these .gone days of lower budgets. Imagine you have a bunch of sales people and representatives who need data in the field. Usually these people will use laptops which somehow have to be online through a network/mobile/phone - whichever way is a hassle - booting up the laptop, finding plugs, waiting to connect.

    With WAP it's a breeze. Not if you need excel sheets or word documents, but if you just need numbers it is. Server-side WAP is a piece of cake to install, so all you need is a few scripts online which generate WML with the data your employee needs, and there he has it. The big advantage is that this is such a cheap solution, which before would require a laptop or access at the clients place. Now you can have your info within a couple of minutes without the need for wires and batterymunching laptops.

    HOWEVER, as I understand, WAP was designed with location-based services in mind, and when that becomes a reality, WAP will kick ass.
  • Just fix the bandwidth to mobile devices problem and we get real web access - no need to dumb it down into a useless level of funtionality.
  • I much prefer WASP bashing myself, it's the only group it's PC to bash after all...


    • That's WOP, not WAP. It stands for "without papers", refering to immigrants not having proper documentation when they arrived to the U.S. This was common among Italian immigrants in particular. The acronym stuck and became a slur.

  • Waste of A Protocol

    :)

    (-1 troll)
  • Jakob Nielsen went to DemoMobile [useit.com] and he says "Last year, most start-ups based their systems on WAP phones, but virtually all presenters now see WAP as a doomed technology. Think of the hundreds of millions of dollars that could have been saved last year if the VCs had bothered running a WAP usability study."

  • WAP 2.0 (Score:2)

    by tcc ( 140386 )
    >>>
    There's been allot of WAP smack these days, some kicking of the WAP dog when he is down, and even some spitting in the eye of WAP

    PR: After much consideration, we've decided that the WAP 2.0 technology should reflect current market and reputation, therefore the resolution was accepted with a majority, and WAP 2.0 shall be named WACK!.
  • "allot" - to parcel out
    http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=a ll ot

    "a lot" - to a very great degree
    http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=a %2 0lot
  • ...is 'cos generally it's on 'devices' with tiny little screens. Not many people's idea of web browsing involves screens which can only manage about 6 lines of text - and yes, I'm one of the few who've actually tried it.

    Basically it's like surfing on a lolly-pop stick.
    • WAP is not for all around general surfing. It is for concise text retrieval and submission. I can rattle off tons of WAP sites I have personally used to quite good effect:

      * PayPal to pass money to a co-worker after lunch.
      * E-Bay to outbid a sniper while on the bus home from work.
      * Amazon at a conference to one click order a book mentioned in a speech.
      * Yahoo yellow pages to find a restaraunt location while walking around in circles.
      * Wireless access to my corporate email, contacts, and calendar
      * Northwest Airlines to get gate details of a friend's incoming flight when picking him up at the airport
      * etc, etc etc...

      The limitations of WAP are not in WAP itself, it's in the sites deploying it, as well as the people using them. WAP will only be as good as the applications built for it. If I expect an experience similiar to the web for WAP, I think it has failed. If I have no expectations for WAP, it is a smashing success.

      Perceptions rule...
      • "The limitations of WAP are not in WAP itself, it's in the sites deploying it, as well as the people using them. WAP will only be as good as the applications built for it. If I expect an experience similiar to the web for WAP, I think it has failed. If I have no expectations for WAP, it is a smashing success."

        Point taken - WAP is exactly as good as the applications built for it, but it's not just WAP applications being 'sold' to the customer - it's the WAP service as a whole that's used by mobile phone companies to sell their latest models, and it's that hype/sales-line that is leading people to expect more than it can deliver... namely "an experience similar to the web".
  • The problem with WAP in the US market
    1. The US market is too fragmented
    2. Slow rollout of 3g networks in favour of intermetiade solutions
    3. You guys still have pagers :D
    4. Cost purchasing spectrum.
    5. Not enought content.

    I use WAP for email, news when im traveling. But its Too little content, too slow and to dev on wap involves using the W* protocols which is an arse to code. WAP 2.0 will be based on existing protocols thankfully to make it easier. But WAP in itself is predicted to be dead within 4 years in favour of broad band wireless solutions (3G).
  • The feature has some good points; but I still find WAP to be almost entirely useless to me, compared to how it was supposed to have walked my dog, cooked dinner, dry cleaned my t-shirts, cloned me, traded currency derivative and played bridge well. Ah, well, I suppose that's an issue more of hyping then the actual protocol.

    I wouldn't worry too much Hemos, I'm led to believe that Bluetooth will do all this Real Soon Now.
  • It's just amazing to see even technically oriented people making just immensily moronic comments about WAP being dead because "they look bad and work slowly".

    Are they braindead? Haven't they noticed that the WAP standard is a large stack of specifications [wapforum.org] - from low and multiple transport level specifications to the presentation layer. Most people seem to be blurred and think that WAP == WML. The presentation layer is just a tiny piece of the big picture.

    So, the presentation layer was not that fancy - so what? Were you around when there was gopher and Mosaic came - was it fancy? (In my opinion yes). So it sucks, now it has been fixed.

    Alright. The first ugly presentation layer might have given WAP bad credit, but wait a while and see....you can do a whole bunch of Amazon stuff [cyberian.org] with it.
  • WAP and WML are such a cool concept. Think of it, the ability to access any information available on the internet, on your cell phone! However, people see that it costs too much ($10 per month), and they realize that text on a cell phone looks like DOS running on a 9" monitor. So, it appears that WAP/WML is going the way of Clear Pepsi (you remember that stuff). Great concept, cool advertising campaign, but, when the reality struck people, it was too much to handle.
  • I use WAP on my Nokia 6210 to check my e-mail if I'm away from a computer, and if I'm expecting an important e-mail. Optus Networker [info2you.com.au] has a nice POP3 client.

    I also occasionally use Lokate [lokate.com.au], a location based service that tells you where the nearest things are, like nearest train station, pizza place, pub. It's based on your cell ID, so it's not terribly accurate, but it can be handy at times. You can even use it to find out where another Lokate user is currently located (it's protected by a PIN and opt-in)

    The main reason I think people see WAP as a failure is due to consultants and industry analysts misunderstanding what it is, and getting everyone to think it's the Internet on your mobile.

    It's also too expensive and too slow to dial into on circuit switched connections. GPRS should fix that though.
  • Well, the Weak Anthropic Principle was never terribly controversial to begin with, and --

    --oh, not THAT WAP? Sorry.

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