A comparison of mobile technologies – Part 2: WAP or mobile web

WAP stands for Wireless Application Protocol. As the definition states, WAP is in fact a protocol or standard which has many different facets to it. The most common use of the protocol is in the production of “WAP sites” or mobile websites. Traditionally, WAP sites were created using a language called WML (Wireless Markup Language) which allowed sites to be created which were almost a collection of “cards” which the user navigated between. Nowadays, most sites use WAP 2.0 which is essentially a light-weight version of XHTML (the markup language of traditional websites).

The use of the mobile web is currently quite limited due to several factors including:

• Lack of education and understanding of the general public of how to access WAP sites.
• Inherent navigational difficulties of mobile browsers (typing in URLs on a phone is quite a tedious process).
• Setup requirements for connectivity settings and data services.

What are mobile website or WAP sites good for?

• Providing access to rich media information including text, images, audio and video (via download).
• Downloading content such as images, video and applications.
• Capturing structured, formatted information or data which must be validated in some way (examples include a booking, reservation, customer information, order, etc.).
• Simple “conversational” interactions – where the state of the interaction must be maintained or where the context is important.
• Membership-type requirements and restricting access to information or services via a login system.

What are mobile website or WAP sites not good for?

• Applications for use in areas with limited or unstable connectivity.
• Client-side processing (i.e. performing some custom action on the recipient’s device such as storing or retrieving information).
• Highly interactive or “suspend and resume” type situations.
• Smart client applications where most processing should be offline and only synchronisation performed online.
• Interfaces which require any degree of complexity beyond simple images and form elements.

What is the extent of device support?

• Most phones, even those in the lower tier have some level of WAP support.
• In South Africa, many of the network operators (as of this blog) do not have data services enabled by default which means some users’ phones may not be set up to access WAP.
• This situation is changing quite rapidly however.

Example application

The Qpid service has a mobile website which provides access to frequently asked questions, privacy concerns and other information which allows users to learn about the system without needing to find a PC. You can access the site from your mobile phone by navigating to http://m.qpid.co.za.

The Qpid WAP site is very simple. We developed a more advanced mobile website for one of our clients which allows call centre agents to produce deals for customers from a web interface and send a WAP push (link to the WAP site) which contains the specific deal information (product photo, pricing, etc) – all whilst on the phone to the customer.

This post forms part of a series on a comparison of mobile technologies.

Tags: wap