Another type of mobile messaging which is gaining popularity is MMS (Multimedia messaging service). The growth of MMS will mirror the growth of camera phones. MMS allow you to send picture messages and share it with others. As the network of MMS capable handsets grows, there is an increase in sending pictures between phones by MMS.

Mobile phone companies such as Motorola, LG, Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and many more have seen their profits sore since the introduction of camera mobile phones. Various networks like Orange, 3 Mobile, T Mobile, O2, Vodafone, Virgin etc offer free camera phone with special deals. The larger colour screen of camera phones makes the mobile phone an interesting and leisure device. These phones allow you to take an excellent photo and set it as the background image in your phone.

WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) adoption has partly been slowed historically by an unattractive, slow and text based user interface. WAP allows mobile phone users to have access to information services. The WAP enabled mobile phone can be connected to the internet instantly and can access any internet service immediately. Colour camera phones tend to support GPRS connectivity and also icon based graphical interface. This makes WAP a far more convincing user experience, and hence is increasing strong WAP adoption. All these features make a mobile phone more than just a device for handling calls.

That really was a load of WAP.

So, a few years on we can ask, like Frankie Goes to Hollywood, ‘WAP, what is it good for’?

More than you might think, given the current deafening silence from those same Mobile Operators.

The rise (and rise) of SMS is instructive. This has gone from nowhere to everywhere with practically no promotion from the networks. Type SMS into Google and you get 52 million hits! In China in 2003, 220 Billion SMS messages were sent. During 2003 in the UK alone, 30 Billion were sent, which equates to 500 for every man, woman and child in the entire country! What is going on here?

Well SMS is cheap, not cheap enough perhaps but, up until a couple of years ago, much cheaper than calling. So it was a viable alternative to making a mobile phone call, everyone could send and receive them, and it didn’t matter what handset you used or what network you were on (or even which country you were in).

Much the same is true of WAP. Most handsets sold this century in GSM markets are compatible. Costs, especially using GPRS, are very low, as long as the information is optimised for the handset. Actually, it costs less to read your email with GPRS than to send an SMS. How times change!

And people are using it, too. In the UK in December 2003, the number of WAP pages viewed was over 1 billion for the first time. The Mobile Data
Association (MDA) forecasts 13 billion for 2004 as a whole, up from 9.2 billion in 2003 (against an original MDA forecast for 2003 of 8 billion).

All this is in the face of complete indifference, if not outright hostility, from the networks. The problem for them is that, as mentioned, WAP is cheap. You can get all the mobile email you need via WAP to your handset for around one tenth of the cost of a RIM Blackberry data subscription. And please don’t ask how much the running costs are of a laptop mobile data card! A while ago, one of my colleagues used more data in a month than the cost of the mobile data card itself. Since then the networks have introduced more reasonable price bands, but he now gets all the email he needs on his cellular phone via WAP for one hundredth the amount spent during those expensive 30 days. And he doesn’t need to carry a laptop around with him, wait for it boot, wait again for it to download the mail, and balance it on one hand whilst holding his coffee with the other and his mobile phone in a third!

One of our customers for our mobile email software reads his mail whilst shaving in the morning. He can find out what has been happening overnight without having to get his computer out, dial in and log on. Another browses whilst tending to his cows, miles from mains electricity. Yet another admits he reads his mail in board meetings. So far luckily no-one has noticed his mobile sitting on the desk in front of him.

And there is for WAP, most likely, no new device to buy, either. Nothing additional to weigh down your pockets or to find room for in your briefcase. And it isn’t just good for email. You can also look up train timetables, get news & sports results, find medical information, find a restaurant and see what’s on the TV tonight.

And you can do all this, with the one electronic device that most people have with them all of the time – their mobile phone.

So – no new expensive devices are required, no high monthly charges are incurred and there is no waiting. No wonder the Mobile Operators aren’t impressed!

WAP has received a bad rap, not only from the media, but also from users of WAP phones who choose not to access data on them. Less than 20 percent of Americans with phones that have WAP browsers actually ever access WAP sites, according to Jupiter Communications analyst Lucas Graves. Only 10 percent of Sprint PCS’ customers access the “wireless Web,” according to Jay Highly, vice president of business marketing for Sprint PCS.

It’s cumbersome to input data on a phone’s keypad and read from such a tiny screen, analysts say. Data is transmitted slowly at 9 kbs and the user pays airtime for the content.

However, don’t blame WAP as a technology for the lack of interest in the phones, analysts say. Perhaps WAP developers are to blame for over-hyping the technology and then receiving a black eye for it, but some think the real limitation of WAP is the lack of compelling content written in its wireless markup language (WML).

On the other hand, software developer Openwave has 14 million subscribers worldwide — which means there’s little interest when compared to the 70 million WAP-enabled handsets that have been sold.

WAP homepages are not very different from HTML homepages. The markup language used for WAP is WML (Wireless Markup Language). WML uses tags – just like HTML – but the syntax is stricter and conforms to the XML 1.0 standard.

WML pages have the extension *.WML, just like HTML pages have the extension *.HTML.

WML Tags

WML is mostly about text. Tags that would slow down the communication with handheld devices are not a part of the WML standard. The use of tables and images is strongly restricted.

Since WML is an XML application, all tags are case sensitive ( is not the same as ), and all tags must be properly closed.

WML Decks and Cards

WML pages are called DECKS. They are constructed as a set of CARDS, related to each other with links. When a WML page is accessed from a mobile phone, all the cards in the page are downloaded from the WAP server. Navigation between the cards is done by the phone computer – inside the phone – without any extra access trips to the server.

• WAP stands for Wireless Application Protocol
• WAP is an application communication protocol
• WAP is used to access services and information
• WAP is inherited from Internet standards
• WAP is for handheld devices such as mobile phones
• WAP is a protocol designed for micro browsers
• WAP enables the creating of web applications for mobile devices
• WAP uses the mark-up language WML (not HTML)
• WML is defined as an XML 1.0 application

People on the move need services, information and entertainment that can keep up with them. With access to mobile services, decisions and interactions happen here and now. The value of mobile services to end-users is boosted by three separate elements: personalization, time-sensitivity and location awareness. Combining these three effectively adds even more value.

Wireless application protocol (WAP) is a protocol that has successfully established a de facto standard for the way in which wireless technology is used for Internet access. WAP technology has been optimized for information delivery to thin-client devices, such as mobile phones.

Mobile services powered by Nokia and WAP have been widely accepted by users. By 2004, the number of WAP users in Western Europe is estimated to grow to well over 200 million (source: Cahners, In-Stat Group). In part, this growth is driven by the introduction of General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), WAP 2.0, Bluetooth and Mobile Commerce.

XHTML Mobile Profile (XHTML MP), the markup language defined in WAP 2.0, is made to work in mobile devices. It is a subset of XHTML and a superset of XHTML Basic. A version of cascading style sheets (CSS) called WAP CSS is supported by XHTML MP.

The primary feature here seems to be the call a friend functionality. Contacts, taken from the iPhone address book, are sorted by state with the most competitive listed first. For example, my contacts from Virginia, Ohio, Florida, Indiana, and Pennsylvania were listed at the top, while those in Delaware, Hawaii, and New York were listed at the bottom.

An official webpage is available on the Obama website, and it is available through the App Store. Those who don’t have an iPhone should not fret — the WAP page for the campaign offers some of the same features.