With common knowledge dictating that the U.S. is far behind Japan in terms
of mobile Internet use, it’s no wonder some insiders might feel NTT DoCoMo’s
popular i-mode technology will beat the stuffing out of the Wireless
Application Protocol (WAP).
This is not to say i-mode versus WAP is a tug-of-war between America and
Japan (WAP’s provenance is actually of international flavor as Unwired
Planet, Motorola, Nokia, and Ericsson are all founding fathers), but rather
a matter of which technology is better. Analysts feel WAP, a specification
that theoretically allows users to access information via mobile phones,
pagers and other various and sundry handhelds, is seriously lagging behind
the proven i-mode, which is a complete brand of wireless Internet access.
Boasting over 15 million subscribers and counting, i-mode users enjoy
sending and receiving e-mail, exchanging photographs, shopping and banking,
downloading personalized ringing melodies for their phones, and navigating
thousands of specially formatted Web sites. Though it won’t start your
coffee machine for you in the morning yet, or tell you the latest sales at the
J.Crew a couple block away, the sky is the limit in the years to come for i-mode, analysts seem
to feel.
What is Wrong with WAP? Timing!
Everything — if you ask Jakob Nielsen, who spearheaded a detailed report on
the spec. His Nielsen Norman Group unloaded on WAP when it published a
90-page finding from a field study of WAP users in London. Twenty users were
handed a WAP phone and asked to use them for a week. They wrote their
impressions in a diary. If you think this calls to mind a certain
survivalist series, think again. Health and $1 million were not at stake,
but it did seem to put a finger on the weak pulse of mobile Internet
vis-`-vis WAP.
When users were asked whether they were likely to use a WAP phone within one
year, 70 percent said nay. Nielsen stressed that this finding comes after
respondents had used WAP services for a week, so their conclusions are
more valid than answers from focus group participants who are simply asked
to speculate about whether they would like WAP.
Though the report may have been melodramatic about its findings (“We
surveyed people who had suffered through the painful experience of using
WAP, and they definitely didn’t like it”), it was hopeful for the future.
“Mobile Internet will not work during 2001, but in subsequent years it
should be big,” the Nielsen report said. “We thus recommend that companies
sit out the current generation of WAP but continue planning their mobile
Internet strategy. Don’t waste your money on fielding services that nobody
will use; as we document in this report, WAP usability remains poor.”
The report said simple tasks, such as checking weather and reading headlines
from their WAP-enabled phones, took any where from 1 to 3 minutes. When one
measures that time next to the mere seconds these functions are processed
from a desktop, the discrepancy is resounding.
Maybe users are spoiled by high-speed access, but it doesn’t matter. The
findings from the report make it clear that using a WAP phone is a textbook
example of pushing forward back. To make matters worse, there are cost
efficiency dilemmas inherent in the process. When one considers that airtime
is charged by the minute, it is cheaper to buy a newspaper to check TV
listings than it is to spend the minute calling it up on a phone.
That experiment was the gist of the report. It’s not even necessary to
document the numerous equipment failures that arose for the 20 miffed users.
That does it for the empirical view. What do others think?
Now to Sound Glib, but I Told Them So
David Haskin, managing editor of internet.com’s allNetDevices, has been watching WAP closely
for a few years. He, too, isn’t convinced we are ready to rely on it.
“I used to think WAP caused low consumer acceptance of wireless data (and
make no mistake — so far, it’s a major bomb so far in North America),”
Haskin told InternetNews.com via e-mail Friday. “The WAP forum and Openwave
brought a lot of that problem on themselves by trying to turn this
technology into a brand name (consumers could care less what enabling
technology is used) and raising unreachable expectations for it. The
wireless operators compounded the problem by making un-meetable claims in
their advertising, such as Sprint PCS’ claim to put the Web in your pocket.
Users who tried quickly found out that it was no more than a teensy,
hard-to-read snippet of the Internet on an unreadable screen with
excruciatingly slow access.”
Haskin, who said he was denounced a year ago for making such speculations,
echoed the Nielsen reports findings without having read the report (a
summary was sent to him after he responded to questions about WAP). He wrote
that miniaturized Web content was difficult to deal with and that U.S.
Internet users were spoiled by “low cost, faster Internet access on large,
color screens,” making it “easy to see that wireless Net access was headed
for disaster in the U.S.”
Haskin said that is where firms such as Phone.com went wrong — by assuming
that WAP would be as huge a success as i-mode is in Japan, where mobile
users rely on their phones more than their desktops for Internet access.
So where does that leave the status of mobile Internet in this country? Is
it paralyzed in a stasis of mismatched technology and user demand, and
premature business models? Not so, said Goldman Sachs.
NTT DoCoMo Could Play Avenging Angel to Mobile Wireless in U.S.
So, given the sad state of mobile Internet in the U.S., is it any wonder
DoCoMo was able to buy 16 percent of AT&T Corp.’s Wireless unit for $9.8 billion this week?
Analysts at Goldman Sachs are extremely bullish on this play, which they say
could jumpstart the adoption of mobile Internet use in the U.S. because of
DoCoMo’s extensive knowledge of pushing i-mode as a brand. And DoCoMo is
still going as it plans to unleash its next-generation mobile system, based
on wideband CDMA (W-CDMA), that can support speeds of 384 Kbps or faster,
making mobile multimedia possible.
The analysts also said i-mode does not pose a competitive threat to the
embattled WAP spec. Their feeling is that WAP and i-mode will eventually
work together: “…we believe that the two technologies will converge, with
XML offering the underpinnings for the unification between both standards,”
the GS report said.
Now that we know DoCoMo has powered i-mode’s success in Japan, who will bear
the WAP torch in the U.S.? That mantle would likely fall to Openwave Systems
Inc., GS said. The product of a merger between Phone.com and Software.com,
Openwave carries the mobile Internet customers in Japan that NTT doesn’t,
which could easily make NTT a threat to the new company, whose closing two
weeks ago has since seen a stock butchery of 50 percent.
Openwave has recovered somewhat since DoCoMo’s investment in AT&T Wireless
(up 21 percent on the day at midday trading Friday to $55.13), and while
allNetDevices’ Haskin said “i-mode will definitely take a ding out of WAP in
the U.S. now that AT&T Wireless is licensing it from DoCoMo,” GS said
Openwave must boost carrier confidence by getting products to market faster.
GS also said it sees future partnerships between DoCoMo and Openwave on the
horizon, as both firms have expressed interest in XML conversion to
wireless. They also see Openwave as a potential technology vendor to DoCoMo,
whose Hutchinson subsidiary already moved Openwave’s WAP gateway and browser
for i-mode services.
GS feels the firms will learn to work together to patch up busted mobile
Internet
use in the U.S.
