Frankly I think WAP is all hype and no reality. The standard which is based
on HDML and agreed to by all the major phone manufacturers, has major
usability flaws which I will outline below. In addition, there is very
little consumer demand for it.
>From interactive week, May 29:
"What do consumers want? IDC asked mobile-phone users how interested they
were in Net access using their phones. Just 7 percent said they were
uninterested. Unfortunately, 75 percent said they were very uninterested.
It's a classic case of top-down push marketing, Parr says, a coincidence of
vendor need; wireless providers trying to scramble up the value chain in
order to increase per-subscriber revenue, cover high costs and slow churn,
with technology prowess, because they can. Service providers want
Internet-style growth without the open platforms and commodity pricing that
fueled it."
In Europe, Deutsch Telecom found that it's users used WAP less than once per
week.
Here is what the Wall Street Journal had to say in June, 2000 about the WAP
experience,"...too often, the experience is one of overloaded servers, a few
unimaginative services and a few lines of text scrolling slowly up a screen
halfthe size of a credit card."
I mean think about it. You have a one inch square screen with 4 lines of
text each line about 12 characters. All typing has to be done using a cell
phone numeric pad. Do you know how long it takes to type in one's email
address let alone a shipping address using a ten digit keypad. Hell, there
isn't even an @ sign without pressing the 1 key repeatedly and who's gonna
know to do that. Now ask yourself what ordinary person on the street is
going to bother going through the pain of searching amazon for a particular
title and then ordering it, typing billing address and credit card number...
I think there are a few extremely limited uses for WAP mostly having to do
with receiving a small message, (which any email capable cell phone can do)
and maybe typing in a yes or no answer. Most people don't care about
internet on their phone. There also maybe some information junkies that need
sports scores and stock quotes (again something just regular email to your
[EMAIL PROTECTED] will accomplish). All the applications I've seen
just aren't compelling unless I'm really bored. You're not going to surf the
web while you're stuck in a traffic jam.
Now let's talk development. Every phone has a different screen size. In
addition, every individual manufacturer is responsible for implementing WAP.
What this leads to is the IE vs Netscape nightmare but 50 times worse
because you've got all these different manufacturers all doing their own
thing and all adding their own maddening inconsistencies over how the
navigation is done.
Lastly it's really expensive for the individual. You're paying per minute
for internet access. In addition, because the connections don't stay open
all the time while you're surfing, the phone has to keep reattaching the
connections. Since cell phone companies charge in one minute increments each
attempt to connect is an additional minute. So one minute on the internet
plus 3 connection attempts means you just got charged for 4 minutes. Nice
little racket they have going don't they.
I think as a consultancy if you can charge clueless companies hopping onto
the great WAP bandwagon go for it. It's like taking candy from a baby. I
work for a firm that is not a consulatancy, we have an actual service that
we sell, playing games by email. We needed a wireless play to get our second
round of financing. We looked long and hard at WAP and concluded that it
isn't there yet, in spite of incredible pressure from the VCs funding us.
Palms are. Nice screen, easy text entry, good UI. In spite of this I don't
expect ordinary consumers to use our service. They just don't want it.
They'd rather look at people or listen to the radio.
I think its impressive that you got porn refreshing on a cell phone.
Personally I'd rather buy a playboy.
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Sean Renet
Sent: Monday, October 30, 2000 12:57 PM
To: Fusebox
Subject: Re: Wireless
First of all, this doesn't sound very stateless. It may be good for a video
game that requires no internet state, but how would your Palm architecture
handle multiple simultaneous users?
Secondly saying "stay away from wap" is the worst advice you are ever going
to give anyone. That is like saying don't program for Netscape or don't
learn Java because it takes too long to code. The fact is, WAP is the
second gold rush. The train is leaving with or without you. And yes just
like HTML you have to program for different browsers. The dream of
standardization is exactly that, a dream. I am also very bullish on Palm,
however I am not going to paint my self into a corner with only one wireless
solution. Companies with only one solution of anything are going to join
the pile of dot gones.
Last, exactly what tweaking of your servers did you have to reconfigure? I
have now put up several WAP sites and have yet to reconfigure anything. One
of the WAP sites was a porn site that required simulated full motion video.
You can do just about everything in WAP that you can do in HTML save killer
UI. And once more if you are using coldfusion I am guessing all the work is
being done server side anyway so repurposing data is just a matter of
syntax.
Becareful about staying away from new technologies. It is way better to
have experience in all technologies, than to wake up one day and realize no
one likes your betamax. WAP is a no brainer, it is already widely used. If
you or your company have not invested time into developing for WAP, perhaps
you should. My last three clients I took over from other CF development
corporations because they did not have a wireless solution or they only had
one. Long ago it was easy to convince a client to use one technology over
another if that is all you knew. Now clients are much more informed. If
you say our only wireless solution is Palm and that is what we are going to
build for you, you are going to have clients that take your scope document
elsewhere.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Edward Chowdhury" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Fusebox" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Friday, October 27, 2000 9:56 AM
Subject: RE: Wireless
> Yeah, stay away from WAP. What a bogus thing that is. We're doing wireless
> gaming and have standardised on Palm.net architecture. Basically you have
an
> HTML browser but you download all the graphics to the palm at the very
> beginning using a Hotsync. After this all you do is send the palm an html
> page referencing the graphics that are already loaded on the palm. The
> upshot of this is that you can deliver nice rich looking pages with pretty
> sophisticated functionality just by sending a "web clipping" that contains
> text and links to graphics already on the palm. Our pages are about 2k
each
> which really isn't bad. In addition, any static pages like rules, privacy
> can also be downloaded just once and then stored using a hotsync along
with
> the graphics.
>
> Because you're using HTML you don't have to really tweak your servers or
> configs like you would with wap, and you can repurpose all your current
> content.
>
> ed
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Rick Lamb
> Sent: Friday, October 27, 2000 12:24 PM
> To: Fusebox
> Subject: Wireless
>
>
> Any of you guys have any recommendations for building cf apps for wireless
> clients (connecting between 14 and 16 kbps)?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Rick
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
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