Eric Bernatchez
Bored with your cell phone's stamp-sized screen? You're not alone. Surfing the wireless web with these Commodore Vic-20 like interface is just boring. But don't despair, WAP and its black and white wireless web may not last long. What is coming up is much better: the Web, the good old web, right on your cell phone.
The thing, in fact, is already a reality in Japan, where NTT DoCoMo provides customers with broad multicolored screen phones that can display regular Web pages. Or, so to say: pages that can be easily adapted from existing Web pages. It made the difference in what is now a famous success story in the cellular industry.
Started from nothing in 1999, DoCoMo, whose service is called " I-mode " had 10 million subscribers last summer and today, hardly 8 months later, twice as much! Their subscribers base nears 20 percent of the population. A huge success, given the fact that the company's wireless web service, called "i-mode", is only two years old. This incredible success surprised everyone and suddenly, the rest of the world realizes that the best way of making the wireless Web attractive is to make it... the regular Web, quite simply.
And DoCoMo proved that it was not impossible. Now, North-Americans are reacting quickly. Pixo.com, a US company, developed a mini-browser capable of displaying just about any Web page and fit them to the smaller size of cellular screens. The result is amazing: the Web on a telephone, nothing less! Pixo can even display jpeg (".jpg") images and supports tens of thousands of colors.
Even NTT DoCoMo, invigorated by the strong impression it has made on the whole industry, is starting to open offices on all the continents to export its know-how. Thus, a recent alliance with AT&T in the United States will make it possible for both companies to offer develop a service similar to Japan's "i-mode". Other such deals with DoCoMo were recently announced in Europe.
In addition to that, Openwave, the resulting company of a merger between software.com and phone.com (most North-American phones use a phone.com microbroswer) is planning to launch its new microbrowser by mid-year. Named "The Mobile Browser", that new version will support color and cHTML, the HTML version used by DoCoMo for "i-mode".
Perhaps Openwave and Pixo aren't as ready as they claim and are creating vaporware in order to impress competitors, but DoCoMo can't be more ready, and that's bad news for WAP. They already master their technology and it's not vaporware when 20 million Japanese are using it.
Sites that are already available through WAP will live on, serving the unhappy owners of legacy phones -- today's phones, that is -- that can't efficiently browse regular HTML pages. But once cHTML and other web-like interfaces such as Pixo's start being available, there won't be any interest from web-builders to spend time developing WAP sites. And WAP will have only been a short-lived transition (and an unnecessary one, as we've learned from DoCoMo's experience) to what was the most obvious thing: the web, the real web.
What does it mean for those in the market for a new phone today? Not much. Most phones available in North-America and Europe offer nothing but WAP. Waiting till next fall?... and what if companies did not deliver? In fact, if you need a phone now but don't want to miss upcoming technologies, buy a cheap one now, knowing that within one year from now, you'll be craving for a new phone anyway.
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