I'm on holiday in Spain, and I have bought myself (at my bosses
expense :-) ) an i-mode phone.
I messed about with wap a few months ago and it left me quite
unimpressed.
The problem with wap is that most wap browsers cannot load ordinary
Internet pages, and that wap content is not easily viewed on an
ordinary PC.
See the wap link for details:-
wap
The great thing about i-mode is that the phones load chtml, a subset
of html.
I found that I could view quite a lot of the Internet with the
phone, including most of my own website.
The other interesting thing is that wap2 is based on xhtml, rather
than wml like original wap.
Read about i-mode and wap2 here:-
i-mode or imode
wap2
Lastly there are quite a number of PDAs out there that support a web
browser and that can connect it to the Internet.
These usually connect via a mobile phone, and, since the
introduction of GPRS are quite usable.
Amongst such devices are Opera running on Symbian phones, Compaq/HP
iPAQ running Windows CE or Linux, RIM Blackberry,
Palm OS, Linux phones and Windows Phone Edition, and the Zaurus.
Read about them here:-
Mobile html browsers
Now to my point, in a couple of years every new mobile phone will
have an i-mode or wap2 browser.
In a couple more almost every phone on the street will have such a
browser.
What will all those bored commuters be doing on the train? A
significant number will probably surfing the web.
So, if you have authored a website, will these devices be able to
view it?
If it has Java, Flash, large flashy images, or even frames, then the
is likely "no".
Presumably you wrote your site because you wanted people to view it.
With mobile internet devices, less is more.
Get rid of the eye candy and go back to simple text and gif images.
Mobile Internet index
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