WAP browsers

WAP browsers, especially in the early days, were slow and frustrating.Typing long

URLs with the numeric keypad was onerous.WAP pages were often difficult to navigate.

Most WAP sites were written once for all phones and did not account for individual

phone specifications. It didn’t matter if the end-user’s phone had a big color screen or a

postage stamp-sized monochrome one; the developer couldn’t tailor the user’s experience.

The result was a mediocre and not very compelling experience for everyone involved.

Content providers often didn’t bother with a WAP site and instead just advertised

SMS short codes on TV and in magazines. In this case, the user sent a premium SMS

message with a request for a specific wallpaper or ringtone, and the content provider sent

it back. Mobile operators generally liked these delivery mechanisms because they

received a large portion of each messaging fee.

WAP fell short of commercial expectations. In some markets, such as Japan, it flourished,

whereas in others, like the United States, it failed to take off. Handset screens were

too small for surfing. Reading a sentence fragment at a time, and then waiting seconds

for the next segment to download, ruined the user experience, especially because every

second of downloading was often charged to the user. Critics began to call WAP “Wait

and Pay.”

Finally, the mobile operators who provided the WAP portal (the default home page

loaded when you started your WAP browser) often restricted which WAP sites were

accessible.The portal allowed the operator to restrict the number of sites users could

browse and to funnel subscribers to the operator’s preferred content providers and

exclude competing sites.This kind of walled garden approach further discouraged thirdparty

developers, who already faced difficulties in monetizing applications, from writing

applications.