Interesting article from the Sunday Times (London) July 2.
July 2 2000
DOORS
Wap takes the rap
Strictly speaking, Wap
stands for wireless application protocol, a technology designed to
put a web browser inside any compatible mobile phone. Believe none
of it. The true translation is what a palaver, and the chances of your
using it in any meaningful way are pretty much zero.
I was at a mobile-phone conference the other week and inquired,
casually, who among the assembled telecoms hacks and execs there
actually relied on Wap for anything useful. Even the sales people
responsible for telling us this stuff is so essential seemed
hard-pressed to work up any enthusiasm.
Nine months ago, we were all being told that Wap was a revolution
that would draw us away from PCs and turn the mobile phone into
our primary window onto the web. Now the story is changing. Wap,
as we know and hate it, is merely in version one. This explains why it
is dreadfully slow, horribly unreliable and deeply unpleasant to use.
Add to this the Nokia 7110, the loathsome lump of plastic thrust at us
as the ideal cheap Wap phone. This has had more bug revisions than
Windows - each one demanding a return to the Nokia dealer, since
the net-savvy beast is incapable of updating its memory from the web
directly. Hang around one of the Nokia newsgroups and you soon
appreciate the agonies a number of 7110 users have undergone trying
to elicit a reliable service from their handsets.
©
What a palaver: trying to use a Wap phone to access the internet
Anyone actually using Wap to pick up e-mail or run an online bank
account deserves a medal, or at least a subsidy from the phone
companies to pay for all those calls needed to extract any worthwhile
information out of the average service.
Inevitably, the phone biz has an ace up its sleeve. Even better
technology is around the corner that will deliver the goods, and all
you need - surprise, surprise - is to buy yet another phone.
There is something to be said for this idea. Ericsson, which in my
book makes much better phones than that other Scandinavian giant,
Nokia, recently showed me the little beauty they will be releasing next
Christmas. The R250 comes brimming with awesome features. Place it
on the table and it becomes, without pressing a button, a powerful
speakerphone. Pick it up and hold it to your ear and the thing reverts
back to being a personal handset. It has voice recognition built in,
along with support for Bluetooth, the next-generation wireless
standard that will let it communicate with similarly equipped palmtops
and notebooks.
It also has support for general packet radio service (GPRS), the
coming data standard for mobile phones. With GPRS your phone is
always on and you are charged per chunk of data, not by the second.
So your e-mail turns up without you having to log on, and GPRS
promises much faster data access than the snailphones we use at the
moment.
I saw the R250 demo, played with the thing myself, and desperately
wondered if there was a way of smuggling it out in my pocket without
anyone noticing. The trouble is it would hardly have mattered.
Bluetooth will not be generally available until the end of the year.
More to the point, GPRS is already starting to look distinctly flaky.
BT Cellnet, the first to offer it in the UK, was crowing a few months
back about how it would deliver landline modem speeds - up to 56k in
my book - to the mobile user. This has now fallen to 27k - three times
the current speed of mobiles, true, but still half that of the average
home connection, and I doubt most of us are happy with these.
Indeed, it may be so slow that it is actually incompatible with the
lovely Ericsson R250.
Life may improve. GPRS could be tweaked, with considerable
invest-ment, to provide much higher data speeds. In the meantime,
smarter handsets will doubtless help divert us away from the plain
truth that we are still waiting a terribly long time to pass quite modest
amounts of information across the mobile airwaves.
The Wap bubble is bursting, and the dreams of those companies
hoping to ride it to some net fortunes are not far behind. The truth is
that, for all the compromises, the best way to go online is a PC
connected to a phone line. For all the hype about smart televisions,
palmtops and Wap, that is unlikely to change for some considerable
time.
Which online issues would you like David Hewson to discuss?
E-mail him at doors@sunday-times.co.uk
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