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Subsections

WAP - A Basic Misconception

Beyond its procedural and technical flaws, we believe that WAP represents a fundamental misconception of what can feasibly be accomplished using cell phones, and what actual users are going to want to do with their phones.

Mobile Messaging, and Mobile Web Browsing, represent two very different forms of mobile communications activity. Mobile Messaging refers to the ability to send and receive personally directed messages, while Mobile Web Browsing refers to general information retrieval from anywhere.

Both of these bring undoubted value to the user, both can be accomplished on a cell phone, and the mobile user of tomorrow will certainly indulge in both activities. However, the value that the two activities bring to the user, and the suitability of the two activities to the cell phone, are very different.

Mobile Messaging allows important and/or time-critical information, which may require the user's immediate attention, to be pushed to him/her quickly. This is something which is of inherent and compelling value to the off-line, mobile user. By contrast, the desire of the mobile user to go back on-line for web access rarely has the same importance or urgency.

A basic question is: which of these two mobile applications represents the best initial value? We believe that Mobile Messaging is the right answer for initial mobile applications development.

The Wrong Answer Initially: Mobile Web Browsing

The basic goal of the WAP specification is to allow Internet web browsing using mobile phones. The assumptions underlying this goal are, first, that web browsing capability can be adequately accomplished on a mobile phone, and second, that this is something that will be of significant value to mobile phone users.

However, we believe that neither of these assumptions is correct. First, the cell phone of today is a totally inappropriate device for the purpose of accessing the mature Internet. Not only is the cell phone user interface completely inadequate for general web page display, but the wireless network medium also imposes severe limitations on the speed, immediacy, and reliability of web page access. It is simply not practical to surf the web using today's four-line text displays, over a slow, congested network with unreliable coverage.

As Kevin Maney observes in his article Cell phones let the Web 'go mobile' [9]

``Web phones can be slow and frustrating. Click on The Weather Channel, for example, and the phone takes 6 or 7 seconds to send the request through the Sprint wireless network, into the Internet and to The Weather Channel's WAP-enabled Web server, then get back the next menu. On that menu, click ``cities,'' then wait a few more seconds before getting a request to enter a ZIP code. You do that using the phone keypad. A few seconds later, you get the report. Only about 10-15 words fit on the screen at one time. You scroll down to read it.''

It can be argued that future improvements in display technology may act to alleviate these difficulties, and this may very well be the case. However, the need for convenient portability of ``unconscious carry'' communications devices such as cell phones and pagers exerts tremendous design force towards reducing the size of these devices. The effect of this force is plainly apparent in the current trend towards extreme miniaturization of cell phones.

The design force towards miniaturization is something which is in direct opposition to display capability. For this reason, we believe that unconscious carry devices will continue to have severely limited display capabilities.

Second, there is the question of what people are actually going to do with the brand new medium of wireless data communications. How, and in what forms, will this medium become part of society? In ten years time we may have the answer, but today, nobody knows.

Of all forms of risk, prediction is the most gratuitous - yet none of us seems able to resist it. WAP's answer is that mobile web browsing will be enthusiastically embraced by society, and that it will be done via the cell phone device.

Our answer is that we doubt it. People will do things on a mobile basis that make sense to do while mobile - they will access the information that is most useful to them while away from the home or office. This includes such things as urgent e-mail messages, and highly specific urgent and important information. But it does not include general-purpose web browsing.

Web browsing is an interactive activity, for which the user requires a near real-time response. Furthermore, browsing, as the word indicates, is not an activity that has any urgency, and is therefore not something that there is a compelling reason to do while mobile. For both of these reasons, we believe that people will continue to do their web browsing at the home or office, and that web browsing will remain a marginal component of mobile communications.

It is true that the prospect of mobile Internet access has created tremendous excitement in the marketplace. And there is something magical about putting a cell phone in someone's hand, and providing a demonstration of live mobile Internet access. But the enchantment that this creates in the user stems from its technological novelty, not from its enduring day-to-day usefulness.

The Right Answer Initially: Mobile Messaging

This is not to say that all Internet data access is without value to the user. On the contrary, consumers certainly will use their mobile phones for Internet data access. However, the nature and types of data they will access will be appropriate to the medium.

They will access data that they have a need for and can use while mobile, that does not require near-synchronous system interaction, and that can conveniently be accessed via a mobile device.

The single application that satisfies these criteria better than any other is mobile messaging, or e-mail. Interpersonal messaging has already become an indispensable aspect of modern life, and is now the dominant application for the fixed Internet. We believe that society will adopt mobile messaging with the same enthusiasm as conventional e-mail, and that it will achieve similar dominance on the wireless Internet.

Unsupported Claims

There is presently an enormous amount of hype surrounding WAP. The WAP proponents have hyped its abilities far beyond what the consumer will actually be able to do with his or her cell phone.

There is a general perception that WAP will essentially put the entire Internet into the hands of the cell phone user. It is understood that a good deal of the form of a website may be lost in translation to the cell phone, though its basic textual content will be preserved. Beyond this, however, there is a perception that any website can be accessed in this way; i.e. that WAP will make the entire Internet content accessible via cell phone, just as it currently is via a conventional ISP.

However, this is not the case. WAP provides access to websites by translating the HTML coding of web pages into something that a cell phone can understand and display. What this means is that in order to get information from a website, the site must have a WAP-enabled server, and the server must be programmed to extract the website content that can be displayed on the miniature cell phone screen. In other words, if your favorite website is not WAP-enabled, you probably will not be able to access it through your cell phone.

For this reason, the tremendous hype surrounding WAP has yet to be backed up by commercially available WAP products and services. As Antony Bruno comments in his article Market gap producing WAP alternatives [5]

``A running joke among industry players has the WAP acronym meaning Where Are the Phones?''

WAP phones and services are not available in the marketplace, because the promises of WAP are simply not real.

Not Device-Independent

The WAP specification is being promoted by the WAP Forum as a general-purpose wireless protocol, suitable for a wide variety of end-user devices, including PDAs such as PalmPilot. As noted in Section 3.1, however, WAP is in fact highly phone-centric - it is strongly oriented towards the mobile telephone physical device, despite the WAP Forum's claims of device-independence.

We note in passing that during the time that it was promoting the general-purpose nature of WAP, Unwired Planet, a founding member of the WAP Forum, changed its name to Phone.com. There are, of course, many good reasons why a company might wish to change its name. It strikes us as ironic, however, that while promoting the device-independence of WAP, this founding WAP Forum member abandoned a device-independent name in favor of a device-dependent one.

Limited Web Browsing Capabilities

The WAP Forum claims to bring web browsing capability to the cell phone. However, the cell phone device is simply not equal to this task. Because of the user interface limitations of the cell phone - its very small screen and limited keypad - the resulting web browsing experience is clumsy and impractical.

Furthermore, use of the WAP specification to access web content requires the use of WAP gateways, which translate the WAP-enabled website content into a format which the end-user can access. These gateways are controlled by the Service Provider (typically the wireless phone service provider), not the information provider. This usage model is very much contrary to the existing Internet usage model, in which the Service Provider plays the role of an entirely passive intermediary between the website provider and the website reader. In other words the Service Provider functions purely as a pipe. In this model new website content becomes immediately available to all Internet users as soon as it is created by the website provider. This unrestricted connection between the creators and consumers of Internet content has been one of the keys to its extraordinary growth and vitality. Because of this open characteristic the Internet has been able to grow organically - i.e. spontaneously, autonomously, and without planning, control, or approval by any central authority.

In the WAP model, by contrast, the WAP gateway operated by the Service Provider plays the active role of translating and storing web content, and therefore controls access to the content by the end-user. New websites and new web content do not become available to the end-user without the active participation of the Service Provider. This places a layer of control and authority between the creator and consumer of website content, greatly diminishing the potential for unrestricted and organic growth of the Internet.

Existing Technology Adequate

The premise of providing access to important information through a cell phone is certainly valid. As noted above, however, the nature and quantity of information that in practical terms can be delivered via a cell phone is severely constrained by the device itself.

The nature and quantity of information that can be delivered is sufficiently heavily constrained, that it can be adequately delivered using existing technologies.

The equivalent of most, if not all, of what WAP promises to deliver on a cell phone can very reasonably be accomplished using existing and already widespread technologies such as SMS. Indeed, this is already being accomplished today. Various companies, including Xypoint, AmikaNow!, Roku, ThinAirApps and Microsoft, are already providing services equivalent to WAP's claimed functionality. This is being done using existing cell phones and existing cellular services. For more information, and a more complete list of companies providing such services, see [5].

Voice Interface Adequate

The screen user interface limitations of a cell phone are so severe, in fact, that its data access capabilities are almost always better served by its voice interface - with which, of course, all cell phones come equipped.

The genuine utility of WAP on a cell phone resides in those applications for which a visual data interface is superior to a voice interface - that is, in those applications for which screen and keypad are better suited than speaker and microphone. Given the limitations of the cell phone screen and keypad, however, this is an extremely narrow range of applications. In other words, if all you have is a tiny screen and a miniature keypad, then in most cases you are better off using the voice interface.

Use of the voice interface to access important or time-critical information is already fairly widespread. The implementation of increasingly reliable speech recognition and powerful text-to-speech systems can be expected to make data transfer via the voice interface even more convenient.


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Next: Conclusion: WAP is a Up: The WAP Trap An Previous: WAP - A Technical