Some of our WAP browsers are missing

IT'S NOT only the Internet telephony app which is missing from some Nokia N95s. The dedicated WAP browser is missing too. Making it almost impossible for some mobile sites to be reached.

The reason is that no Nokia handset using S60 3rd Edition FP1 - which includes the N95 - actually has the seperate dedicated Nokia WAP browser which the company normally labels 'Services'.

This turns out to be entirely intentional. According to a posting on the Nokia Forum, "Restricting S60 users from accessing full web content is highly undesirable and strongly advised against. Instead users should be provided a choice between the two.

Preferably the choise should be made 'sticky' via a cookie freeing the user from constantly having to switch between the two formats."

An example of providing the mobile surfer with the choice would be an initial page giving two options: - "1. Switch to: mobile or 2. full page."

This means that every site that automatically detects browsers and switches mobile users to WAP 1.0 or WAP 2.0 instead of HTML needs to be re-programmed.

Consequently a US surfer with an N95 found himself totally unable to access the coupons offered by Cellfire because the N95 switches itself to full HTML where the coupons aren't available.

One of the easiest ways out of this mess would be to create a seperate site for WAP users and using the .mobi suffix seems the logical option.

What can N95 users do? The INQ has searched high and low and only illicit copies of early alternate WAP broswers are avavailable.

The Opera mini browser behaves exactly like the standard N95 broswer, for example.

The INQ even tried updating the N95's OS software.to Version 11 but to no avail. Incidentally you can find out whether you need the upgrade by typing '*#0000#' into the handset.

It will then display your version details.

Truphone has championed the cause of the Internet Telephony app to be installed on Vodafone and Orange. But who's going to push for the re-introduction of the Services browser? µ