WAP is Dead, Long Live WAP 230
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.
WAP 1 vs. 2 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
WAP in the UK (Score:2, Interesting)
Slashdot wap page? (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
The Reason it's only just starting to catch on... (Score:3, Interesting)
Another reason it's use is picking up (I would think...) is that you can buy java games, ringtones, graphics etc from your provider via WAP, which is now a big business.
WAP for tracking Euro banknotes (Score:3, Interesting)
hey spammer, scam somewhere else (Score:3, Interesting)
why are you really here on slashdot ? perhaps you would do better if you concentrated on your portfolio's selection rather than spam people with pump and dump [groupshares.com] scams , maybe the authorities should take a closer look at you
Set up your own WAP gateway (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:wap.slashdot.org? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Slashdot wap page? (Score:3, Interesting)
It might just be that google sends the html page to me because my blackberry does support html too, maybe wap.google.com works okay for others with wml only phones?
Re:Slashdot wap page? (Score:3, Interesting)
One can get a good VOIP call at 2 kB/s, which is 120 kB/minute. So if they went lower than 0.01 NOK per kB, it would suddenly be cheaper to call with voip over GPRS then making phonecalls with most plans.
Slashdot's lite/wap/palm interface (Score:4, Interesting)
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:WAP 1 vs. 2 (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:And stay dead! (Score:3, Interesting)
most sites with actual content work usually pretty well in opera for series60 for example(hell, even pr0n tgp sites are mostly navigationable). if the content has to be wrapped up in neato flash then there weren't that much content usually to begin with(besides videoclips or games that you wouldnt be playing/downloading on that mobile anyways).. so you can't browse sites that would be useless for you anyways with a mobile which isn't that much of a problem actually.
and if a site owner bothers he can check the browser tags and return a stripped down version for mobiles without too much hassle.
of course now with rss feeds being all around you could just use blogines or whatever to read just them nicely.
New Technologies (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:One more user .. (Score:2, Interesting)
Wrong-o (Score:3, Interesting)
CHTML is a nice clean subset of HTML (think HTML 2.0) which supports all the stuff you're used to, forms, gifs, etc.
WAP, on the other hand, has a broken idea about "decks" of cards, which they thought would be needed for 400 baud connections or whatever it was designed for.
Writing WAP applications is irritating, because they don't work. The gateway you're using has the wrong max packet size, or the phone you're using doesn't support the image format, or
iMode, on the other hand, works on all iMode phones, they have fanatical quality control and DoCoMo calls the compatibility shots.
Calling WAP a success but the implentation a failure is like calling Communism a success in theory, but it just had a poor implementation.
Re:One more user .. (Score:5, Interesting)
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).