Hi, Ray - Good read.
The Japanese aversion to DSL should be noted by cable and DSL providers here; the time when they are going to have their lunch eaten by wireless is fast approaching. Wireless may not take market share, but it sure will cap it.
Seeing the ease of use enabled by i-Mode, and the (relatively) good translation of web pages, you've gotta wonder why eveyyone just doesn't drop WAP, and head for i-Mode, or as you suggest, cHTML.
WAP looks to me like a kludge dreamed up to accomodate bandwidth limitations.
Microsoft has it about right when they compare WAP to DOS, see article below. I wonder if that means that their devices, in the handheld area, will gain market share?
In portable devices, there is a view that, as wireless infrastructure buildout proceeds, and bandwidth increases, more people will opt for the richer functionality offered by Microsoft handhelds (as opposed to handsets).
What a fascinating field; you need a scorecard to keep track of all the players, never mind the games!
Microsoft compares Wap with Dos
Microsoft won't support Wap in its handheld device software because it says the mobile internet protocol's functionality is limited and has compared it with the text-based Dos operating system.
Speaking at the software giant's TechEd Europe conference this week, Dilip Mistry, Microsoft's mobility solution centre marketing manager, said Wap functionality would not be delivered natively in the company's Pocket Internet Explorer software. Users would instead have to use third-party Wap browsers, he said.
"Wap can be compared with the functionality that was offered by DOS [on the PC]. It is not a rich internet experience for end users," said Mistry.
At the Cebit trade fair in March, Microsoft executives said the company had been considering including Wap support in Pocket Internet Explorer, but these plans have been scrapped.
Mistry said that users are not really asking for the ability to see Wap pages on handheld devices, and he described the protocol as limited.
The lukewarm response to Wap is significant because Microsoft chairs a group involved in creating a security standard for the protocol.
Separately, Microsoft plans to provide a Soap (Simple Object Access Protocol) client for the Pocket PC next year. Soap is a cross-platform XML technology that is central to much of the company's future development work, particularly around its .Net platform.
Researcher Ovum predicts that the market's focus on Wap as a technology will be eroded through the emergence of new mark-up languages under the XML standard, and Wap will become indistinguishable in its own right by 2003 to 2005.
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