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. |
