WAP may be crap but it's going down a storm

ALTHOUGH WAP is almost universally panned by critics as dead in the water, the latest figures produced by the UK's Mobile Data Association (MDA) show WAP usage reached a daily average of 38 million pages impressions in January 2004.

That's more than double the 17 million page impressions achieved back in January 2003. Indeed January's total is the highest monthly figure yet recorded. Furthermore the MDA forecasts this astonishing growth will continue reaching a total of 13 billion for 2004 compared with the 9.2 billion WAP page impressions recorded for 2003.

According to MDA chairman, Mike Short, "The fact that ring tone and games downloads regularly contribute to the rising number of WAP [page impressions] viewed in the UK each month has been well documented by the MDA. Increasingly, mobile operators are partnering with companies in the news and sports arenas to provide more compelling content and improved ease of navigation around mobile Internet sites."

He added that users interested in services such as flight and train timetables can expect to see more content available to them. The MDA tracks WAP page impressions according to a definition agreed with four network operators in the UK (excluding 3 and Virgin Mobile). It says that a WML file, or combination of WML files, sent to a valid user as a direct request results in one WAP impression being claimed.

Most observers forget that portals such as Vodafone Live! are actually WAP based. It would be interesting to see figures for how many services are now employing WML 2.0 pages which look far superior to a 1.x page from a user's perspective. More details here. µ