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What WAP Phones Do You Use? 21

Posted by Cliff from the finding-the-best-value dept.
Splunge asks: "I'm looking into buying a new mobile phone (in North America) with a good WAP browser, Internet access, and the general spiffy phone features. I'm assuming I'd want one with a fairly large screen (6 lines at least, maybe more) and also good battery life, etc. So far I've found the Nokia 7160/7190, the Mitsubishi T250/T255, or maybe the Sprint PCS NP1000. They look decent but I haven't seen them in person so I don't know. I'm also considering the new VisorPhone but wonder if a Visor for a phone would be too bulky. Any ideas on some good models and what to look for? Even a good Web site for cell phone reviews might help. I've found fairly little."
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What WAP Phones Do You Use? More

What WAP Phones Do You Use?

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  • ...could you also see if you can find anthing on those cell phone blockers? I heard some restauraunts in France had a way of interfering with cell phone signals so people could dine in peace. Has anyone come up with a personal anti-cell phone device? Maybe some kind of visor unit, I don't know.
    Or a directional signal that would cover the two or three blocks ahead of me as I ride my bike through the city. Drivers who I am about to encounter would have their phone calls cut off as I approached, and the sudden sensory deprivation would cause them to look around through the window of their jeep in search of some replacement stimulation. Moving objects, such as me approaching on my bike, might be just exciting enough to grab their attention, especially if there were bright colors. Conceivably, they would be willing to react to the world around them during this dead-phone period, but could return to talking as soon as I and my handy device had safely moved out of the area.
    Ambulances and fire trucks could use this too. Let me know what you find. Thanks.


  • I have a Sprint PCS Touchpoint 120 and it's pretty nifty. It handles the essential phone basics very well - a reasonable battery life and good coverage around town and the city (town = Boulder, CO, city = Denver). The signal easily gets lost if I go up into the mountains, but that's to be expected. I am a little wary of their billing / web ordering process though - when I signed up they accidentally created two accounts in my name and billed me an extra $50 that I didn't owe before they eventually got it sorted out. Finally, their web site [sprintpcs.com] is also often overloaded if you want to check or pay your account online.

    The WAP features were quite a fun toy for the first week or so, but you can't really do any serious stuff with 6 lines of text. I find myself using it occasionally to check my email and get movie times when I'm outside (one of the dangers of being in Boulder [bouldercoloradousa.com], I suppose). Look on Yahoo! [yahoo.com] for a WAP directory [yahoo.com]. Note that sending mail is possible but requires much patience, and there is no direct POP3/SMTP support (web email like Yahoo! [yahoo.com] works just fine). It has a secure WAP implementation of some sort, so you can happily buy stuff online [amazon.com] from anywhere. The phone also has some basic PIM features, but I largely ignore them as I also have a Palm. I think I could plug my Palm into this phone and get online that way, but I've not yet had the urge to try.

    In short: I love this phone. As long as you don't want the world, you should be fine with whatever Sprint WAP-enabled phone takes your fancy. You mention the NP1000 - I had a look at one in the store and I didn't like it. Sure, it has a larger screen - but it looked suspiciously fragile, and it was only single band (ie: no analog roaming).

    I did find some reviews on Epinions [epinions.com], so go have a read. There was a mobile phone section up on the Deja.com buying forums, but they're gone now that Deja has reverted to being a usenet feed (yay!).

    If you primarily need a new mobile phone - get one and enjoy WAP as a toy. If you need full web access (or if the phrase: "mobile ssh [www.ai] or telnet [em.com.br] client" starts you drooling), get a VisorPhone (or wireless Palm if you don't mind not being able to make voice calls) - but the monthly subscription fee might be astronomical compared to the 1500-minute per month holiday offers I've seen Sprint pushing recently.

    - Chris.
  • Once Bluetooth comes out, the (wireless) combination of a packet-switching phone with fast data and a PDA like the Palm or PocketPC will wipe the floor with WAP. I'm usually fairly complementary about emerging portable tech, but WAP is a poor bet...

  • I'm looking into buying a new mobile phone (in North America) with a good WAP browser, internet access, and the general spiffy phone features.

    WAP is terrible. It's slow, the gateways are unreliable, screens are too small... And if you're wanting to do real show-off things like check your Yahoo Mail account, realize that filling in a username/password on a WML form is a very trying exercise.

    Check out Jakob Neilson's WAP Field Study [useit.com]. Look at the times to accomplish simple tasks with WAP.

    I purchased a Nokia 7110 six months ago, and never bothered using the WAP features after the first couple of days. It collects dust on my shelf now, replaced by a (non-WAP) 8890 that is much more stylish, can stay comfortably in my front pocket while I'm sitting down, and works nearly anywhere on the planet that cellular service is available.

    Get a phone that's just a phone. If you really want wireless 'net access, get a Palm Vx and a Minstrel [novatelwireless.com].

  • *So* last month! (Score:3)

    by maggard ( 5579 ) <michael@michaelmaggard.com> on Thursday December 21, 2000 @06:21AM (#545863) Homepage Journal
    WAP phones are passé. For the screen to be any use they have to be too big, for the phone to be any convenience it's got to be too small. Plus what kind of 'web experience' is it when you're just scrolling through lists?

    Look, I'm sure there's a "killer app" for celphones but I haven't found it yet. Movie-times? Got an audio service that does that and aside from the Santa-on-speedballs quality of the announcer it works fine. Same for most of the other services - nothings uniquely useful, nothing pressingly important to me.

    It's all the shopping-power of an inflight magazine with the information services of an 80's "press-1-for..." service. Oh - and for stocks - what percentage of the population really needs constant access to the stock listings?

    I'm not being Grinch here, I've a WAP-enabled phone myself & played around with it. Yawn. Go find some friends/co-workers/other locals & ask them what they use their WAP phones for - most of them *don't*.

    Buy a phone for size & weight, buy it for audio quality, but it for battery life, buy it for ringtones if you want, but don't make WAP an important criteria unless you're in the WAP business.

    -- Michael

    ps - Motorola StarTAC 7867W - small, rugged, great battery life, excellent audio quality (esp. with the EVRC codec turned on.) All of the bells & whistles plus WAP. CDMA 800/1900 & analog 800 MHz. My only complaint is that the Data Kit (cable & software) costs US$100.

  • "..have their phone calls cut off as I approached.."

    i don't know, i think that getting their phone cut off would cause them to look at the phone, put it back and say "hello" a few times, then try and start dialing again, causing even more distraction from what the SHOULD be doing..

    maybe a device that sends out a prerecorded message on a frequency that all cell phones in the immediate vicinity could pick up on, like static or something. only this would say something like "hey you idiot, there's a bicylist coming up behind you, watch where you're going!". dunno, just a thought.

    maybe you could just get an airhorn and honk at them as you get closer..

    "Leave the gun, take the canoli."
  • OK - our experiences differ.

    My sweetheart & I got matching StarTACs together, my keypad died the second day (top row wouldn't respond.) Took it in, got it replaced (no data transfer though) & both are working fine.

    I looked at rhe Nokia's but for price/performance/frequencies the StarTAC came up better for me, YMMV.

    I would recommend anyone buying a cellphone actually try a few calls on the two or three they come down to. We almost went with a Sanyo 3500 but after several tries from different locations turned it down - the sound quality just didn't compare to the StarTAC's.

    Also look into which codec you're going to use. I drive through some spotty-coverage area's (I-89/I-93 through VT & NH) regularly and the EVRC codec has made a big difference in my marginal-quality. Instead of breaking up speech fades in & out, makes it much easier to follow what the speaker is saying.

  • Has anyone come up with a personal anti-cell phone device?

    In the US, use or sale of these would be illegal. The FCC specifically bars devices that intentionally cause interference. Owning, manufacturing, marketing, offering for sale or operating a cell phone jammer is punishable by an $11,000 fine and up to a year in prison for each offense.

    The laws relating to this vary as you move around the world. There are companies in England, Japan, Taiwan, and Israel that manufacture jammers. This Link [newhousenews.com] should tell you more. According to this article, Hubgiant of Taipei, Taiwan sells a personal Cellular telephone jammer. There are others around, but I'm sure that there are plenty of scams for them out there- if you get a "illegal" jammer in the US, and it doesn't work, who are you going to complain to?
  • As I have read somewhere in the WAP or HDML info pages, the gateway is what's holding your keys.. When you reconnect to the gateway, you start a ssl like connection to the gateway and then the gateway figures out what session you had by your telephone number and then continues from that session. It's just the wap server protocols. Quite nifty.. and also Quite annoying too.. and Quite insecure if the fbi ever decided to tap your cell phone.. they could probably get in any site you were previously on.. unless you click on logout :P
  • BTW - to change the codec (vocoder) on many StarTACs:

    Dial V-O-C-O-D-E and hit Fcn twice.
    Sto to change
    End to quit

    Like I said, EVRC gives the best audio quality though there can be quirks with carriers that don't support it. Of course the tower can always over-ride your settings (think of them as 'requests'.)

    I use EVRC locally and 13k roaming; my sweetheart use 13k exclusively and his can be 'choppy' to use during hand-offs and inside buildings.

  • Bluetooth is a poor bet also. It isn't designed for net access; it's designed for communication between various pieces of hardware that you own, such as your headphones and walkman. It replaces short cables and wires. Bluetooth on a cell phone won't get you the web, too short a range.
  • Just for the record, when I use my Motorola Timeport (look! it's a StarTAC! oh, wait... it's silver...) to check my yahoo mail account, I only had to enter the login and password once. I don't know if it's the site, the gateway, or the phone saving the data, but you do only have to type it once.

    Now I just start my browser (4 clicks), and then press 5 (for yahoo) and 1 (for mail) and I'm reading my list. 6 clicks isn't bad.

    On the other hand, sending mail of any length is out of the question unless you're REALLY stuck somewhere for a while.

    As a plus, the timeport is pretty much just a phone-- the screen is tiny (4 lines) and wap access is more or less tacked on as an afterthought. Works for me, though... small, long battery life, and a quick way to see if anything important is lurking in my inbox.
  • Hey,

    ...could you also see if you can find anthing on those cell phone blockers?

    I have! There's a UK (where I am) company called SESP, website here [sesp.co.uk]. "All cellular telephones within the specified range of active SESP jammers are unable to make or receive calls, and calls in progress are immediately cut off when the unit is activated. 'No service' appears on the phone's LCD display. As soon as the jammer is switched off, the cellular service is immediately restored."

    For GB£125 (less than $125), you can get thier Wave-Shield [sesp.co.uk] cellular jammer. 50m range and less that 75g, ideal to put in your pocket at a concert, if you can hack together a battery power source. They also have products up to a range of several kilometers, some rack-mounted. Cool!

    Cguard [cguard.com] also make a jammer-type product, but they don't have much in the line of priging details.

    Interesting, eh?

    Michael

    ...another comment from Michael Tandy.

  • While it may be illegal to intentionally _cause_ interference, I don't think passive methods are illegal. If your resturant/store/whatever happens to be built with enough electo-magnetic sheilding that cellular devices can't effectively communicate within your establishment, I think you'd be in the clear. Of course it may cost you an arm and a leg. There are probably better alternatives, but it's just a thought.

    -Andy
  • I went out and bought the new Samsung SCH-8500. I found this phone to be very nice, it has a WAP browser and a 6-line screen. I use it for getting directions, movie times, weather, news, scores, and all kind of stuff on-line. The nice part of the phone is that Samsung has a nice text entry mode called T9 that lets you type words and only having to press each key once. For the most part, you can type short messages up rather quickly. It basically works by matching up the key sequence with words it has in an internal dictionary. The phone is also dual-band, which I really wanted, and has a good battery life and short charge time. It also has a number of PIM features you can use as well. The calendar is really nice. If you don't want the PIM, you can get tthe SCH-850 (if you can find it) and save $20-$30. Anyway, it also fits nicely in my small change pocket of my pants and is less than 5 oz. The only thing that I dislike is that it seems to lose connection while in standby easier than some phones when I am in some large buildings, but it stays connected better if you are talking on it. Other than that it is very nice.
  • manslaughter charge wouldn't stick once it was established that your crushed corpse was carrying a device it was using to intentionally distract me.

    how is an airhorn (which would barely penetrate the sound-proofer newer cars) different from those old bells bikes used to use or the horns other cars have? are you going to try and run down a bigrig cause he honked at you? 'cause i believe any hand-held airhorn i could get wouldn't pack a punch compared to the ones on those 18-wheelers.

    i wouldn't be using it to distract you, i'd be using it to announce my presence.
    "Leave the gun, take the canoli."
  • If your resturant/store/whatever happens to be built with enough electo-magnetic sheilding that cellular devices can't effectively communicate within your establishment, I think you'd be in the clear.

    Absolutely, shielding would be *very* expensive, and quite high maintainence. You would either need an "air-lock" style door, or a serpentine with RF-absorbent materials (the materials are very expensive, and it takes a lot of square footage). I saw a serpentine at a secure facility I visited once. They didn't want the airlock doors since the shielding used to seal those doesn't last too many cycles. For a truly RF tight facility, you also have to shield your power going in and out, and any sort of communication lines, because they can sometimes act as passive radiators. Just putting aluminum screens over the windows isn't enough. As you go up in frequency, the quality of the shielding has to go up- meaning smaller holes for the rf to go in and out. It would probably be cheaper just to hire a door-man that would frisk anyone that enters.
  • That's not what he was saying. The phone connects to the internet through GPRS or UMTS. The PDA connects to the phone through Bluetooth. Then the PDA is the input/output device and the phone is the network access device.
  • Er, I have to disagree about the 7867W. Yes, it's fairly small (but the Vulcan's smaller) and the battery life will get you through a pretty long day, but I've had to send mine back once already because the earpiece went bad. (I've had it since April.) Folks at the cellular store were well acquainted with the problem, which suggests that my phone isn't uniquely saddled with this problem. The keys have poor feedback, IMHO, too, and sometimes the keys bind, resulting in the wrong keypress. This happens pretty rarely, but it's annoying none the less.

    Before this phone I've had various Nokias and have been much happier with them. I've even dropped one of them down flights of stairs and it continued to work perfectly. (It did put a small crack in the faceplate, though...) The UI works much better, IMNSHO (I'm a former UI geek), too. The two things that bugged me about the Nokias were 1) You couldn't force them into analog mode, and 2) They didn't have an internal vibrating ring. #2 isn't an issue any more with the latest phones, but to my knowledge you still can't force them into analog mode.

    HTH...
  • My company develops applications for the wireless Internet -- phone, PDA, what-have-you. The general consensus among the developers here is the Mitsubishi T255 is the best WAP phone out there. The screen is HUGE. Predictive text input, 7.1 oz with battery. This Geek.com review [ugeek.com] might help.

  • Mitsubishi T250 (Score:3)

    by jheinen ( 82399 ) on Thursday December 21, 2000 @01:03PM (#545879) Homepage
    I have a Mitsubishi T250, and I'm happy with it. The big screen really helps (10 lines using the small font). The T9 word-completion feature makes text entry very easy. I was surprised at how accurate it is.

    That being said, I have to admit that I don't use the WAP capabilities that much. It was cool when I first got it, but the novelty has worn off. It does come in handy for looking up phone numbers and addresses, or getting driving directions. It has been a real lifesaver a couple of times. But on average I probably use WAP only once or twice a week at most.

    I use AT&T, and the nice thing about it is that the basic WAP service is free for unlimited usage. So you have the capability when you need it, but it doesn't cost you anything

    Disclaimer: I am a consultant currently working as a WAP developer for AT&T's PocketNet service. This message should not be considered an endorsement for AT&T's service.

    -Vercingetorix

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