Why Pockets Are Reaching Out And Touching...

Pocket Internet access, using WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) or other technologies, is really
about saving time, and money -- we'll get to that in a moment. But first, let's review the much-maligned
WAP's checkered past.

Poor WAP -- it tends to take the brunt of the blame for the mobile Internet, where most pocket Web users are frustrated by tiny numeric pushbuttons and seemingly smaller monochrome alphanumeric screens.

Also, WAP phones can only directly access Web sites that have been specially coded in WAP's Wireless Markup Language (WML) -- normal Web sites, coded in HTML, are unavailable. Furthermore, there are some security concerns with how encrypted WAP pages are decrypted at certain server boundaries on their way to your phone.

Yet even though some of these criticisms are valid, WAP itself doesn't deserve much of this blame -- it's simply a protocol specification that made some hard tradeoffs to work in the extremely hardware-and-bandwidth-constrained environment of the pocket phone.

Happily, that protocol is evolving, this year. According to the Feb. 12 TotalTelecom (http://www.totaltele.com/view.asp?ArticleID=36831&pub=tt&categoryid=0), the forthcoming "WAP 2.0" will be based on X-HTML rather than on WML, and that will open the door to far more Web sites. According to WAP Forum CEO Scott Goldman, "WAP and iMode [Japan's ultra-successful mobile Internet system] are on a convergence roadmap towards XML."

That's probably good news, in that a converging standard means more interoperability between iMode and WAP sites. And as we're about to see, "anywhere, anywhen" Internet access to certain information can be valuable indeed. Consider, for example, shipping company DHL.

They added a WAP gateway to allow pocket phones to track DHL shipments -- the implementation cost them $18,000 and took six days.

In its first year, DHL's WAP gateway received a quarter-million queries (compared to only 36,000 queries to their normal Web gateway during its first year), and they figure this has saved them money -- a lot of money: A voice inquiry to a human operator costs DHL about $2.50. A WAP inquiry costs one-tenth of one cent.

So, for certain applications, it would seem that people do like the flexibility of being able to access information, such as package tracking status, from their pockets.

And for such focused tasks, people do seem willing to put up with today's, shall we call them "challenging," user interface constraints. For example, when it comes to "thumbing-in" short text messages, or SMS, the Feb. 14 NetNews describes how people were willing to do that during December to the tune of 100-million messages on GSM phone networks! During 2001, people are expected to send 200 billion SMS messages -- from their cumbersome cell phones!

The bottom line is that people are taking to pocket data with a vengeance. The Feb. 20 Nua Surveys (http://www.nua.ie/surveys/index.cgi?f=VS&art_id=905356476&rel=true) describes that 9.6 million PDAs will be sold this year, and that 27% of those people surveyed said that their next PDA would "do wireless."

And as we've seen, Convergence is in the process of melding our favorite pocket devices, PDAs and the cell phones (http://www.compaq.com/rcfoc/20010305.html#_Toc507925601). Indeed, by 2005 according to Jupiter Media Metrix, there will be 96 million people in the U.S. using the wireless Web. They'll be broken down this way: 75 million using Web-enabled phones, 7.3 million using phones enhanced to work better with data, 4.4 million using online PDAs, and another 9.4 million using PDAs that don't directly access the Internet. (http://www.wirelessnetworksonline.com/content/news/article.asp?docid=
{CA4CDCC5-117F-11D5-A770-00D0B7694F32}&VNETCOOKIE=NO)

A bit to my surprise though, a recent Yankelovich Partners poll found that 53% of those surveyed would prefer to carry more than one wireless device, rather than an "all in one" combo. And 25% said they'd carry three or four! (http://www.allnetdevices.com/wireless/news/2001/03/07/poll_americans.html) Go figure...

No, pocket Web surfing, by phone or by PDA or by whatever, isn't (yet) the same or as flexible as using a desktop's large screen and keyboard. But for specialized tasks, the money saved and the flexibility offered by pocket Internet access, via WAP or through other technologies, is not "pocket change" at all!

This is an excerpt from the "Rapidly Changing Face of Computing, " a free weekly multimedia technology journal written by Jeffrey R. Harrow, Principal Member of Technical Staff for the Corporate Strategy group at Compaq. A more extensive version of this discussion, as well as others around the innovations and trends of contemporary computing and the technologies that drive them, are available at http://www.compaq.com/rcfoc . Jeff's opinions do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Compaq. The RCFoC is a service of, and Copyright 2000, Compaq Computer Corp."