What Do You Use WAP For? 49
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?"
WAP is obselete, that's why (Score:4, Insightful)
WAP was designed as a dumbed down "html" using xml, speficially for devices with small screen sizes and slow processors. It was good for the cellphones at the time. Now, cells phones are much more powerful, often come with colour screens featuring more pixels -- enough to be usable on legacy (html 4.0) webpages. And if a website is properly designed with CSS for layout, these new phones have no problem displaying the content of existing webpages, eliminating the whole need of WAP.
And thus WAP died.
"And thus wap died" (Score:3, Insightful)
I get wap over GPRS so its reasonably fast. I have a P800 so the screen is a reasonable size. I don't pay a fixed fee for my GPRS so I don't get
generic IP access so I can't run a web browser or
use the built in email reader.
However, I can go to wap.yahoo.co.uk and read
mail at my yahoo account and I can reply via my
phone if I need to. I can also send instant
messages to people such as "Turn your phone on!!".
You may think wap died but I use it regularly to
check my mail without having to pay extra for web
access. I count this as usefull and not a sign of
death in any way.
I also sometimes use it in bed to check the news
headlines to see if anything really important and
worth getting up for has happened. It usually
hasn't.
Bob.
Confusion about what WAP is (Score:5, Insightful)
WAP is a family of protocols, documented here. [wapforum.org]
WML is an obsolescent markup code that is part of the WAP family. It has been "replaced" by XHTML Mobile Profile in the sense that phone manufacturers recommend XHTML-MP as the forward path. It has not been replaced in many phones that are still in the active user base.
Many people suggest that current Web standards (XHTML + CSS) mean there is no need for specialized support of handheld devices. This opinion generally is held by people who (a) do not actually use phone-based wireless browsers and (b) have not read the XHTML-MP standard and have not yet discovered that it might be nice to, for example, click and dial a phone number.
What WAP is used for (Score:3, Insightful)
However I work for a national FM radio and we provide a bunch of related WAP site.
People really don't use WAP to check what is on air. Neither do they use it to get the frequency they can listen us, neither do they use it to read news about music. Well, they do, but only once, only very quickly.
What they are spending time on, and what they are wasting money for is the chat section. The chat features geolocalisation so they send stupid messages to nearby people, hoping for a fuck. I don't know whether it actually works, but at least they try a lot.