What Do You Use WAP For?

FePe asks: "I have a Siemens M55 with WAP support, and I have experimented a little with it. I can search on Google, upload my own pages in WML (try this on your mobile phone, which isn't a WML page, but it works anyway), and also browse other small regular HTML pages. It seems to me that nearly nobody uses WAP these days, at least that's what my impression is, so I was wondering if Slashdot readers use WAP, if you use it at all?"

Expensive

[BigZaphod]

It costs me per kilobyte to use anything that accesses the web on my phone. So I don't. They can give me unlimited night and weekends to anywhere in the country, but if I try to access Google they try to take both my arms and one of my legs.

This might explain why few people use WAP.... Use it once and after you get the bill you are no longer able to push the buttons on your phone...

It's pretty useless.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had a WAP phone for about four years. The most use it's ever been was looking up movie times, reading the news headlines while sitting in a waiting room or, my favorite: seeing if I can find a better deal for stuff on Amazon.com when I get sticker shock at CompUSA - all while standing next to the item in question.

But beyond doing things as simple as that it's mostly useless. It's much quicker to look up movie times on my PC before I leave the house, I now carry a Gameboy Advance SP for playing in waiting rooms - and I shop online in the first place rather than compare prices to the store.

The web is quite usable on a Palm with the Blazer browser - even reads Slashdot no problem (although the light index [slashdot.org] sometimes helps).

Rebranded

[tengwar]

Yes, WAP is heavily used in Europe, but it's usually been branded as something else, e.g. T-Mobile's T-Zones or Vodafone Live. Calling it "WAP" now would be a marketing disaster, even though the various protocols are pretty good at their jobs. Blame the Nokia 7110 - that heap of second-hand silicon only implemented about half the standard, and the efforts of the early content providers to support it led to bad sites.

A Wireless Data Cable

[TechnoPops]

Honestly, I use WAP because I'm too cheap to buy a data cable for my phone. Whenever I want to put a MIDI ringtone or a wallpaper on my phone, I just put it up on my server (since these tend to be small and I have a 256kb upload connection, this usually takes less than 5 seconds of my time) and use my phone's browser to download it. Easy, simple, and I save myself 20 bucks.