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Are Cell Phones The Only Viable Platform For WAP?
By Jason Levitt
Do a few things well, only deploy standards when they make sense, but above all, create a better user experience. So says Jeff Hawkins, one of the chief designers of the Palm OS, which runs inside every Palm personal digital assistant. He used these tenets when designing the operating system, which owns, by most estimates, 85% of the PDA market.
In the same June 27 PC Expo Keynote address where he discussed the tenets that influenced Palm, Hawkins listed the Wireless Application Protocol--the much-hyped suite of protocols and developer tools being used to bring Web applications to cell phones and other wireless handheld devices--a distant fourth on his list of killer apps for wireless smart phones. (No. 1 was better voice quality, No. 2 was personal information manager integration, and No. 3 was messaging.)
Later that same day at a press conference, Palm rolled out its Mobile Internet Kit, hardware and software connectivity products to bring Internet access and Palm's proprietary Web Clippings technology to other Palm devices besides the Palm VII, where it's already available. And, by the way, unspecified WAP software is also included in the Mobile Internet Kit.
Palm Sticks With Web Clippings
Hawkins may not work for Palm anymore--he's CEO of Handspring, which makes the successful Palm Pilot clone called the Visor--but the tenets he used to decide which features to include in the Palm OS are still evident. Yes, WAP is simple; but it doesn't create a better user experience for Palm users, and isn't a standard that makes sense for Palm users. Compared with Web Clippings, which takes full advantage of Palm's persistent storage and large display to create a reasonably rich pseudo-Web experience, WAP is positively anemic. Bill Maggs, Palm's chief technology officer, says Palm wants its users to be able to "see everything" on the Internet, including WAP, but the company has no intention of embracing WAP over Web Clippings.
Road To TCP/IP
Interestingly, every cell phone, PDA, and wireless network infrastructure executive I've talked to concedes that running pure TCP/IP and HTTP to wireless devices is inevitable. It's just a matter of how long it will take to get faster wireless networks and more powerful handheld devices in place to support it.
Compaq's new H3650 PocketPC with the optional PC card jacket and a Cellular Digital Packet Data PC Card is a compelling indicator that the future is closer than we think. The Compaq H3650 is well-equipped with a very readable 320-by-240 pixel color display, 32 meg of RAM, and a 32-bit, 206-Mhz StrongArm CPU. The Pocket Internet Explorer browser in Windows CE 3.0 does an excellent job of rendering content (it has JScript, cookies, and Secure Sockets Layer, but not Dynamic HTML or Java). Though CDPD isn't fast (19200 bps max, with a typical feel of 9,600 bps), the user experience is convincing enough to see that TCP/IP over a public packet data network is viable.
The Long Wait
But Palm never made any WAP announcements until PC Expo. In fact, Palm let its one-year license on the Phone.com WAP browser lapse recently, and in its Mobile Internet Kit press release, it didn't even mention where it got its WAP browser and protocol stack. One Palm employee showed me a Palm running the unreleased Neomar WAP browser and stack on a Palm V, but Palm representatives later told me that they've actually not announced whose WAP software they'll use, only that some WAP software will be in the Mobile Internet Kit, due later this year. Neomar, meanwhile, has scored other noncell-phone licensees, including the popular Blackberry RIM pager.
WAP's Uncertain Future
Compaq, meanwhile, has made no WAP announcements concerning its H3650, though Neomar is working on a WAP browser and protocol stack port to Windows CE 3.0.
WAP, it seems, only barely makes sense as a standard for Palm, and it seems doomed to linger as merely a complement to pure TCP/IP and HTTP on most noncell-phone handheld wireless devices.
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WAP is designed to bring Web applications to cell phones and "other wireless handheld devices," but the overwhelming message I took away from Palm's press conference, its first public announcement concerning WAP, was that WAP was a simple checkoff item and, at best, a second-string player on Palm PDAs.
In the bigger picture, though, neither WAP nor Web Clippings offers a better user experience than HTML and HTTP running over TCP/IP. For corporate deployment purposes, both Web Clippings and WAP require significant reworking of existing content and an intermediate proxy gateway machine to funnel the content to the handheld device. The proxy gateway can be a point of contention for deployment because content and, in some cases, security protocols are interrupted and restarted before proceeding to the wireless handset. If these wireless devices ran end-to-end TCP/IP using standard Internet protocols, security mechanisms and Web-site content would be far easier to deploy.
Currently, most cell phone manufacturers license their WAP browser and protocol stack from Phone.com. In fact, nearly all the cell phones on the market in Europe and the United States run some version of the Phone.com WAP browser. However, there have been few, if any, PDAs or noncell-phone devices anywhere that have had a WAP browser, and Palm, as the PDA market-share leader, was the next logical wireless handset to announce. Palm licensed the Phone.com WAP browser a little more than a year ago and also joined the WAP Forum, an alliance of WAP developers and vendors that includes nearly all the vendors of consequence as far as PDAs and cell phones are concerned: Microsoft, Nokia, Motorola, and Ericsson.
Palm's announcement is so lukewarm on WAP that its future on Palm's PDA seems uncertain. Further, it's clear that running TCP/IP and HTTP straight to wireless devices is what everyone, including the handheld manufacturers, really wants. For the foreseeable future, cell phones will run WAP and probably few other devices. Palm, with its 7 million customers, is in a strong position to dictate what kind of Internet access it will endorse, and Palm is sticking with Web Clippings for the moment, at least on its Palm line. But Palm is certain to announce a significantly more powerful device later this year, and it'll be interesting to see how this device's Internet-access options compare to the rest of the Palm line. 
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