Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) and Mobile Wireless Access

摘要

While the present adoption of WAP technology is still evolving, future WAP telephone designs will provide the required WAP improvements. However, there is a lot of full-throttle hype that would have one believe that nearly everyone will be WAP-enabled next week. For example, the Strate-gis Group in Washington, D.C., predicts that the sales of handsets with microbrowsers will grow by more than 900 percent to 7.8 billion by the year 2005. They also predict that by 2005, more than 9.6 million people will have subscribed to third-generation networks (3G) or 2.5-G mobile high-speed data services. While all of this is encouraging, we still must wait and see what WAP-based applications come to the top that will encourage the widespread use of the Internet for purely data-based applications. There is no doubt that some forms of short message service will continue to prevail. At present, many vendors have reported utter amazement at the sale of PDAs and other short message devices. For example, short message devices are being sold to a very large subscriber base in the teenage and young-adult market, both in the United States and in Europe. These devices have quickly replaced pagers because now they provide two-way capability.