WAP - The internet on your mobile!

If you haven't heard of WAP yet, you must have been living under a rock for years! WAP is something that's fast gaining momentum and popularity among people from all walks of life because of its many advantages. Imagine sitting in a train with nothing to do, you pick up your cell phone and start reading the latest news, or your favourite blog, or chatting with your online buddies. Welcome to the world of WAP!

WAP stands for Wireless Application Protocol. It's the standard developed for displaying web pages on the smaller screen, i.e the mobile phone. WAP pages are different from normal web pages in that they are less graphically rich, more compact, and a tad smaller in size to provide a better wapping experience.
Compared to PCs, mobile phones have many limitations, such as:

* The smaller screen (176*220, 240*320, etc), cannot display web pages in their full glory.
* Most mobile handsets (except the newest ones that are 3G capable) are slowcoaches when it comes to data transfer rates, so a regular web page that is a few hundred KBs in size takes ridiculous times to load.
* The lesser amount of RAM on mobiles (most of them don't even have a RAM) makes it difficult to load heavy pages and to display them.

To overcome these limitations of small-screen devices, WAP sets forth some standards that are to be followed to make pages able to be displayed on cell phone screens. The characteristics of a typical WAP page are:

* WAP pages are written in WML (Wireless Markup Language), that focuses mainly on text and less graphics-intense elements
* Most WAP pages contain only plain text and links (means no eye-candy!), and if there are advertisements, they are very limited.
* A typical WAP page is only a few KB in size, so it can be loaded considerably fast onto a mobile phone.

How to access WAP pages? Well, you need a GPRS enabled mobile handset to view WAP pages. Some browsers can emulate WAP pages on the PC as well, like the Opera browser. Or you can use the online WAP browser at http://www.wapsilon.com.

The WAP world today comprises thousands of sites specifically made for the portable device. The growth rate that WAP has displayed is amazing. Today WAP sites of all categories have been developed. I will list some of them here:

* Forum and chat - These are the most popular sites on WAP today. Just like on normal internet, a majority of the people use WAP for chatting and making new friends. Mopilot(mopilot.com), WAPocalypse(wapoc.com), etc. are some of the premier chat sites on WAP.
* Portals - Many WAP portals exist solely for the purpose of providing useful information to the masses. They also provide WAP directories. TwilightWAP(Twilightwap.com) is a really useful WAP portal.
* Free WAP hosts - Sites such as Pepperonity(en.mcommunity.biz), MyWAP(mywap.o2.co.uk), WAPamp(wapamp.com) and TAGTAG(tagtag.com) provide free online tools to build and host WAP sites for free on their servers. It might be a good idea to build your first WAP site in one of these pages. I have a few such sites:)
* Search engines - what's web without search engines?! Same applies fow WAP also. Even Google has a mobile edition now.
Ofcourse, there are many more categories of WAP sites, but they're for you to find out and enjoy.

Like I said before, WAP pages are written in WML. This is a real easy language to master, and you can easily develop a WAP site to promote your business with little or no cost quite easily. Some good WML tutorials can be found at W3Schools (http://www.w3schools.com). And now there's even more reason to build a WAP site. Many companies have come forward with advertising on WAP sites. Even Google has an Ádsense for mobile'program now, that focuses on advertising on WAP pages. But whatever you do, make sure that your WAP site is not too flashy on advertising, as it will make it hard for the poor WAP user to use your site.
Well, this is what WAP is today, and let's hope it gets bigger and better with time. New technologies like xHTML are used today to add flavour to the WAP pages. WAP is a technology with promise, and with mobile devices getting stronger and smarter, WAP will surely evolve. Happy WAPping!