Jenna,
What if that beautiful and voluptuous woman is a drag queen underneath?
The following appeared in The Outlook earlier this year. The Outlook is a wireless newsletter by Andrew Seybold.
Their main questions are obviously infrastructure support, quality of data (they cite, elsewhere, lack of emphasis on corporate data excepting WirelessKnowledge and the 3Com initiative. WirelessKnowledge is currently wrestling with firewall problems.), and form factor.
I will look for the specialized applications to develop to determine if wireless is ready for prime time in the US. The stock quotes, weather reports, sports scores are a first pass.
For example, airline reservation wireless applications. Will a wireless user, whose behavioral profile is probably less patient than a desktop user, be content to drill down thru layers of web pages using phone buttons to get to the information that is important to him or her? My guess is that the frustration level has not been anticipated yet in the mad rush to get wireless to market. Intelligent agents may be a solution but that is a ways off. My guess also is that a user may decide it just may be easier to call a travel agent than go thru all this, at least until the sophisticated apps arrive that are robust enough to be supported by the limited phone form factor and underlying network.
This is all just beginning. There is obviously a huge push behind this if for no other reason that no carrier wants to be left behind. Only time will tell how long it takes. I certainly dont have the answers, but it is certainly not unhealthy to stay alert with an armload of questions. Nothing happens this easily.
wirelessroadmap.com
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The Frenzy Continues Around WAP Enabled Handsets
By Barney Dewey
The frenzy around WAP enabled digital handsets continued at the PCS ?99 wireless trade shown in New Orleans this week. We think it will be a couple of years until WAP enabled handsets are very useful for most customers. The technology is in place but two important components are faulty. First, know one really knows what type of information customers are going to want to get on their handsets. We have our own opinion on some of what needs to be done on the content side. Refer to the article on Active Content.
The second unresolved issue concerns handsets. Most handset vendors are bringing out new models with WAP browsers that are very similar to their existing models. These handsets have small screens with a few added buttons to control the WAP browser. I find it difficult enough on a Motorola StarTAC phone to read names and associated numbers let alone a short message or the weather in the city I am traveling too. If you like a flip phone, the small display makes the usefulness of WAP services questionable. The best small handset we saw was the Nokia 7100 series. The display was still small but more readable showing more characters than other handsets in the ?cigar? shaped category. The best handset we saw for accessing WAP information services was the NeoPoint 1000 series. Its 11-line 16 by 120 display allows reading messages and other information snippets fairly easy. The trade-off is overall size (6.4 oz., 5.5 x 2.0 x 1.0 inches). It is not large but bigger than the most popular cigar phones like the Nokia 5000 and 6000 series. In addition to the display issue is the WAP memory issue. In the U.S., there are no real persistent wireless connections. When one is ?out of coverage?, the handset needs to have stored important information like appointment times and names. Otherwise, the customer will not be able to rely on many proposed WAP services.
We believe it is still a couple of years away until these customer usage issues get resolved. Until then, the market for WAP services is going to be slow. Additionally there are other technical issues still around that will slow WAP service adoption. The WAP browsers in handsets need a digital connection from the handset to the WAP information server. There are three types of connections that can be made: SMS (Small Messaging Service), circuit-switched data (9.6 Kbps for GSM and 14.4 Kbps for CDMA) and packet data. None of the three major technologies (CDMA, GSM, TDMA) are supporting packet data yet. Most CDMA and GSM implementations of WAP services will use a circuit-switched data connection. The advantage of circuit-switched connections is the relatively high bandwidth (9.6 Kbps or 14.4 Kbps) for text services. The downside is the time it takes to establish the connection. Most service providers are proving a quick connect service that establishes a connection in around 5 seconds. The other downside is the inability to have information or alerts ?pushed? to the customer. The current release of WAP only supports the customer ?pulling? the information from the WAP servers. All alerts and notifications need to be sent to the customer over the SMS channel. ?push? data services will be supported in the next release of WAP.
The last method of providing connectivity for WAP browsers is to use the SMS channel. This channel is fairly low bandwidth and in most implementations in the U.S. has limited capacity. TDMA service operators?like AT&T Wireless Services and BellSouth Cellular Services?have no choice but to use SMS. TDMA systems do not currently support circuit-switched or packet data. Because SMS was designed for short text messages?up to 160 characters?an overlay protocol is required to support WAP in an efficient way. This new overlay protocol is referred to as GUTS from Generic UDP TeleServices. The overhead of GUTS reduces the capacity of SMS.
So why is this connection method important to the adoption of WAP services? We end up with non-optimized connections between the handset WAP browser and the WAP servers in the first release of WAP. We believe the circuit-switched CDMA and GSM implementations will probably work reasonably well for most customers. The 5 second connection delay will be the biggest problem. Five seconds seems a lot longer when waiting at a stoplight for an important address. TDMA system users may have some serious delays in accessing WAP services when the systems get loaded. The SMS channel capacity is unclear at this time if WAP catches on.
Conclusion
We believe three unresolved issues will delay the adoption of WAP services for the next couple of years. First, it will take some time for the content providers to determine what information services mobile customers want to receive on their handsets and how they want to receive it. The latter issue of how the information is delivered is being overlooked by most. We think the Active Content approach is an example of the type of innovation that is required in the information delivery area for WAP services to be successful.
Second, the readability of the display and the ability for the handset to store important information when the customer is out of coverage are important. The first set of WAP enabled handsets will teach us all a lot about what customers want in a data handset.
Finally, the actual delays in the WAP browser to WAP server connection on a loaded system are unknown. More importantly, we do not know what tolerance customers will have for these delays.
All of the issues together are typical of a 1.0 release system. Everyone in the industry will learn a lot from WAP 1.0. It seems to us that the expectations for WAP 1.0 too high. Any company investing in products or services related to WAP need to be careful. The industry expectations are out of line for a first release technology. A lot of learning?and pioneer?s blood letting?will be made this next year concerning WAP services. |
