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Handheld devices are more limited than desktop computers in several important ways. Their screens are small, perhaps a few inches square or able to display only a few lines of text, and they’re often monochrome instead of colour. Their input capabilities are limited to a few buttons or numbers, or entering data takes extra time, as happens with a personal digital assistant’s (PDA) handwriting recognition capabilities. They have less processing power and memory to work with, and their wireless network connections have less bandwidth and are slower than those of computers hard wired to fast LANs.
The Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) was designed to make it easier to create networked applications for handheld devices despite those drawbacks. WAP is a standardisation effort by the Wireless Application Protocol Forum, an industry association comprising more than 200 vendors of wireless devices, services and tools. The goal of the WAP Forum is to provide a set of specifications that allow developers to write Internet enabled applications that run on small form factor, wireless devices. Typically, these devices are smart phones, pagers and PDAs.
The Problems With Handhelds
A handheld’s constraints mean that it’s usually impossible to directly port a desktop application to a wireless handheld device. For the same reasons, it’s difficult to directly access most Web sites with a handheld device. Web applications are traditionally designed based on the assumption that visitors will have a desktop computer with a large screen and a mouse. A smart phone can’t display a large colour graphic and doesn’t have point and click navigation capabilities. Programmers need to rewrite applications, taking into account the limitations of these devices, and design Web sites so that handheld users can access them.
But the handheld device market consists of many different devices running on competing operating systems: 3Com`s Palm OS, Symbian`s EPOC operating system, Microsoft’s Windows CE, Motorola’s FlexOS, Microware Systems Corp`s OS-9 and Sun’s Java. Handheld applications also need to run over a variety of wireless network architectures, such as Cellular Digital Packet Data (CDPD), Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA), Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM), Personal Digital Cellular (PDC), Personal Handyphone System (PHS), time division multiple access (TDMA), Flex (Motorola’s one-way paging protocol), ReFlex (Motorola’s two-way paging protocol), Integrated Digital Enhanced Network (iDEN), Tetra, Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications (DECT), DataTAC (an advanced radio data information service network) and the Mobitex RAM mobile data network. In order to create a common programming environment that would let a developer write one application that runs on multiple devices and networks, the WAP Specification Suite was born.
Think of it as the IBM PC of the mobile world, it’s the single spec that everyone can write to. Instead of having tiny little islands of mobile information, any user with any handset can access information.
The WAP Forum isn’t a standards body, but it does work with international standards organisations and offers its specifications for official recognition.What makes WAP work as a de facto standard is that the major players in the wireless market all support the specification.
WAP is important because more and more information is going out over the wireless network. Recent IDC reports predict that sales of smart phones, just one type of device that supports WAP — will reach 539 million units worldwide in 2003.
The WAP Forum has a three stage, public- omment process for including wireless standards specifications in its WAP Specification Suite, now at Version 1.1.
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