Is WAP Dead?

Was it ever alive? I remember it being Wait and Pap, and nowadays the mobile phones usually have a "real" browser like Opera Mini or Safari.

I just wonder: Since WAP was for web pages, what Apps did you develop? It is a Web Server technology, not a client side one?

The alternatives are the SDK of the phone in question (iPhone, Symbian, Windows Mobile) or Java (J2ME) which is theoretically compatible with more phones, but still requires a lot of testing due to different screen resolutions, the existance of a keyboard or not etc.


WAP 2.0 has the ability to render XHTML-MP.

Approx. 95% of mobile browsers in existence can handle XHTML-MP.

For 5% of potential users, creating WML is probably no longer worth it.


It may sound stupid, but I think the best mobile platform is the web. You can't know what platform will be the most widely used in a year or two, Symbian, Android, or even that iPhone thing, but you can be sure that more and more mobile devices will get UMTS and/or WLAN and they all will have browsers. And it's pretty easy for you to develop such applications, compared to embedded Java stuff. Plus you can use them from your notebook/desktop too.

Tags:

Mobile

Wap