WAP and i-mode - what difference? By: Oliver Thylmann, Tuesday 2nd July 2002, 19:38 GMT
Oliver Thylmann is sick and tired of reading rants on why i-mode is so much better than WAP - an issue he thinks it blown entirely out of proportion. So, he wrote a rant of his own.
I've read this over and over and over again, and I am starting to get really sick of it - it's just like how some people can't seem to comprehend that WLAN and Bluetooth are similar technologies, but don't compete with each other head to head.
WAP sucks. i-mode rocks and has already killed WAP. Baloney!
Let’s get some facts about WAP and i-mode straight here.
WAP 1.2.1, the most often supported version in current phones on the market, uses the markup language WML, which is based on XML and is rather strict in its layout. Launching a WAP site means writing all pages specifically in WML, and having them in HTML does not really help that much - that is, besides the re-usage of database queries and the possibility to allow scripting languages such as PHP output WML content. In the end, for database driven web sites, it’s a one time task. Also, WML is actually not that hard to learn - it's rather similar to HTML.
i-mode, developed by NTT DoCoMo, is based on iHTML or cHTML (iHTML plus one additional tag), which is a version of xHTML. xHTML isn't much more than HTML with two tags/options added. It’s not that special. It’s done to make HTML fully XML compliant.
The difference between i-mode and WAP ends there - the real difference, that is, not the added solutions that are at the moment only available with i-mode but could in theory be added to WAP as well.
Here comes the nice part. WAP 2.0, which is already being used in the SonyEricsson T68i (its predecessor, the Ericsson T68 can have its firmware upgraded to a version that supports WAP 2.0 too), is based on xHTML. Hang on a minute; are WAP 2.0 phones able to display i-mode sites then? Yes they are. End of story. End of difference.
Well, that’s only half of the story you’re saying. You’re right, and wrong at the same time. You're right because there are other features that NTT DoCoMo managed to implement and pull of very nicely with i-mode. NTT DoCoMo added content billing methods including revenue sharing for content providers. This rocks, and is directly to blame for some of the nice content available on the German e-plus i-mode network. But it’s not something that’s only possible with i-mode. Other carriers can do the same thing, and T-Mobile and Vodafone are currently working together to introduce a micro-payment method which the companies will allow any carrier or company that wants to make use of it to do so. This means that content providers will be able to have one billing partner for customers from both the Vodafone and the T-Mobile network, and there are few obstacles to other carriers adopting the same platform as well.
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