The mainstream media’s honeymoon with WAP technology ended long ago, but the relationship has deteriorated so much lately that the entire affair seems ready for marriage counseling. One reason for the discord is media has a new mistress-iMode.
While the press and analysts have largely panned existing WAP services, applications and equipment for being too slow, too difficult and too boring, they have practically fallen over themselves to praise NTT DoCoMo’s wireless Internet service.
Critics pan WAP on several points. WAP handsets have small screens that don’t support color. WAP applications are text-based. WAP networks are too slow. WAP services are too menu-based and require too much navigating to get to the desired information.
Then they look at iMode: color screens, graphics, multilink navigation and an always-on, packet-based network.
These differences have led to widely different results in terms of subscribers. In Japan, iMode has scored big, attracting more than 5 million subscribers after just more than a year in service. Carriers launching WAP services, on the other hand, have had much slower adoption rates.
Now DoCoMo is planning to extend iMode service beyond Japan. The company has deals with Hutchison Telecom and KPN Mobile NV to bring the service to Hong Kong and the Netherlands, respectively.
Because successful iMode services are entering markets where WAP service is struggling, many have positioned the situation as some kind of standards battle over which will provide the underlying technology for wireless Internet services worldwide.
WAP and iMode use different technologies. WAP uses a markup language called WML, while iMode uses compact-HTML technology, which is owned by DoCoMo.
“It’s not a standards war when there’s only one standard,” said Ben Linder, vice president of marketing at Phone.com Inc., a founding company of the WAP Forum and chief architect of the WAP specification. “iMode is a proprietary system. WAP is an open standard.”
So when people ask Scott Goldman, WAP Forum chief executive officer, if the WAP Forum has any plans to incorporate iMode into the WAP specification, the answer is a flat no.
“A lot of what you hear WAP can and cannot do is not accurate,” he said. “It can do a lot of what these people want, but we can’t force people to implement certain things. Whether site developers choose to deploy these capabilities is their issue.”
Truth be told, cHTML is somewhat easier for developers to use when writing wireless extensions of Web sites. The technology simply tells developers already familiar with HTML which parts of the markup language to leave out when writing wireless applications. WML, on the other hand, requires developers to learn new tabs and codes.
But the issue is not technical. WAP supporters maintain that WAP and WML are capable of the same things as iMode and cHTML. It’s just that these capabilities aren’t being exploited.
“People say that WAP content is no good. That’s not a problem of WAP; that’s the problem of the content provider. They say WAP phone screens are too small. That’s not WAP’s problem; that’s the problem of the handset manufacturers,” said Iain Gillott, vice president of IDC’s wireless practice. “People out there have no idea what WAP is or what it does.”
Essentially, WAP is just a framework to connect Web content to phones. Exactly how that is done is up to the different pieces, i.e., the carriers, content developers, etc. DoCoMo’s success is not in its technology, but in its ability to control of all the pieces.
“People think WAP is the equivalent to the wireless Internet solution,” said Darryl Sterling of Mainspring Inc. “It’s not. There are a number of possible points of failure in the chain-the network, devices, the Web site-that may not be WAP’s fault at all.”
Even critics who realize the issue is not technical still fault the WAP Forum.
“The capabilities are in WAP to do what iMode is doing with cHTML. They basically have the same capability,” said Andrew Seybold, wireless data analyst and editor of Andrew Seybold’s Outlook newsletter. “But in order for WAP to seem easy, the WAP Forum hasn’t taught the Internet community how to do this. They just wanted to stuff HTML content down a phone. … The WAP guys have been fat, dumb and happy with figuring out how to get the Web on a phone and letting the users figure it out.”
The main difference between iMode and WAP services, he said, is that DoCoMo requires iMode content providers to create wireless content from the ground up, while WAP services are simply re-hashed Web sites.
“The WAP people convinced the Internet community that all you do is re-purpose what’s on the Web onto a phone in a menu form. It doesn’t work well. People get frustrated,” he said. “If I am a Web-based service today, I’m taught to add WML tags to my Web site. It goes to a WAP phone with a WAP browser and now I have wireless access to my site. That process of re-purposing information means you have too many layers of menus. You can’t move sideways on your Web site.
“iMode did not re-purpose Web sites using cHTML. Their content was specifically generated to appeal to phones in a phone form factor. The 600 Web sites certified by DoCoMo are not Web sites re-purposed. They have been written specifically for phones.”
But DoCoMo has the luxury of being the dominant wireless carrier in Japan. The firm has the power to dictate to manufacturers the types of phones it wants. Also, Japan’s wireline Internet experience is not very robust. Many Japanese are seeing the Internet for the first time via iMode, controlled by DoCoMo. So if dot-coms want their content read in Japan on iMode, they have to present it in the way DoCoMo asks.
“DoCoMo’s done a great job working closely with each of their providers,” said Andrew Cole of Renaissance Strategies. “They’ve done a terrific job educating the market and working with the content guys.”
This gives DoCoMo unprecedented control of the market. It controls the look and feel of both the handsets and the content. Carriers in the U.S. market don’t have that same degree of control.
“The U.S. market tends to be a little less concentrated,” Cole said. “The danger is that the message won’t get through.”
In the United States, if a carrier demanded all this work be done by a content provider, the content provider could simply sign a deal with another carrier that demanded less.
“I’m sure it’s much more difficult,” retorted Seybold. “But if the WAP Forum had spent as much time educating the Internet community as it did pushing the standard, we wouldn’t be in this mess. This was a bunch of technologists whose goal was to move the Internet down wirelessly. None of them thought about how to make it easier and simpler.”
Goldman disagrees. Seybold “has a very shortsighted view of what WAP is. He is seeing WAP as a very static thing as it exists today, not where it will be tomorrow.” However, Goldman admitted the WAP Forum has some improvements to make.
“I would say we could have been and will be doing a better job relating to the developer community,” he conceded. “We’ve not done that well.”
The forum recently fired its public-relations firm and Goldman has scheduled several road shows to visit the developer community and explain WAP abilities directly. He also said the forum will be adding more robust developer-focused features on its Web site.
But carriers have not taken this same approach, something the WAP Forum will never be able to influence, he said.
“When you boil it down, we’re a technical standards organization,” Goldman said. “Legally, we cannot get into telling carriers what we think they ought to do.”
Eventually, iMode and WAP could become complementary technologies. The WAP Forum is working with the World Wide Web Consortium on the next generation
of markup languages, such as XML, which will include support for wireless networks as well as for Web TV and other newer Internet
access standards.
“XML is the future language of the Internet,” Goldman said. “As both move toward complying with XML, we’ll converge.”
