About WAP

WAP stands for Wireless Application Protocol. It mainly used for connecting wireless devices to the Internet. WAP was developed and released in 1999 by a joint venture between Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola and most GSM cellphones has its browser installed on their handsets. WAP is designed to support the following types of wireless networks:

• GSM
• CDMA,
• PDC
• PHS
• TDMA
• FLEX
• ReFLEX
• iDEN
• TETRADECT
• DataTAC
• Mobitex
• CDPD

All the wireless operating systems are compatible with WAP such as:

• Windows CE
• PalmOS,
• EPOC
• Symbian
• FLEXOS
• OS/9
• JavaOS

The micro-browser is installed on the device and displays content in riched in Wireless Markup Language (WML). Similar to HTML, WML is used due to the handsets lack of memory and screen size. More on this later.

The request is passed to a piece of software found on networks called a WAP Gateway. These gateways are installed by the service provider to interface between the Internet and the different mobile services such as SMS and GPRS. It retrieves the information from an Internet server in normally WML. If the information received by the gateway is not in WML, the gateway will do its best and convert it into WML. If the gateway can not do this then an error is normally displayed.

Many people use WAP to access vital information such as news, sport etc and is popular in Europe. Many people use WAP to subsribe to WAP services to download ringtones to their mobiles. As smartphones and 3G increases it popularity among the consumer it is predicted that there will be no need for WAP as phones will be able to install browsers from the users computer which will display HTML.

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