Wireless Application Protocol (WAP)

It turned out allowing direct phone access to the Internet didn’t scale well for mobile.

By this time, professional Web sites were full color and chock full of text, images, and

other sorts of media.These sites relied on JavaScript, Flash, and other technologies to

enhance the user experience and were often designed with a target resolution of

800x600 pixels and higher.

When the first clamshell phone, the Motorola StarTAC, was released in 1996, it merely

had a LCD 10-digit segmented display. (Later models would add a dot-matrix type

display.) Meanwhile, Nokia released one of the first slider phones, the 8110—fondly

referred to as “The Matrix Phone,” as the phone was heavily used in films.The 8110

could display four lines of text with 13 characters per line. Figure 1.3 shows some of the

common phone form factors.

With their postage stamp-sized low-resolution screens and limited storage and processing

power, these phones couldn’t handle the data-intensive operations required by

traditional Web browsers.The bandwidth requirements for data transmission were also

costly to the user.

The Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) standard emerged to address these concerns.

Simply put,WAP was a stripped-down version of HTTP, which is the backbone

protocol of the Internet. Unlike traditional Web browsers,WAP browsers were designed

to run within the memory and bandwidth constraints of the phone.Third-party WAP

sites served up pages written in a markup language called Wireless Markup Language

(WML).These pages were then displayed on the phone’s WAP browser. Users navigated

as they would on the Web, but the pages were much simpler in design.

The WAP solution was great for handset manufacturers.The pressure was off—they

could write one WAP browser to ship with the handset and rely on developers to come

up with the content users wanted.

The WAP solution was great for mobile operators.They could provide a custom WAP

portal, directing their subscribers to the content they wanted to provide, and rake in the

data charges associated with browsing, which were often high.

Developers and content providers didn’t deliver. For the first time, developers had a

chance to develop content for phone users, and some did so, with limited success.

Most of the early WAP sites were extensions of popular branded Web sites, such as

CNN.com and ESPN.com, looking for new ways to extend their readership. Suddenly

phone users accessed the news, stock market quotes, and sports scores on their phones.

Commercializing WAP applications was difficult, and there was no built-in billing

mechanism. Some of the most popular commercial WAP applications that emerged

during this time were simple wallpaper and ringtone catalogues, allowing users to personalize

their phones for the first time. For example, the users browsed a WAP site and

requested a specific item.They filled out a simple order form with their phone number

and their handset model. It was up to the content provider to deliver an image or audio

file compatible with the given phone. Payment and verification were handled through

various premium-priced delivery mechanisms such as Short Message Service (SMS),

Enhanced Messaging Service (EMS), Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), and WAP

Push.