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That's right folks, it's another WAP round-up!

Much the same in the crazy wireless world

Okay, so what's been happening with WAP? Well, not all that much. i-Mode has got some more useful publicity with AOL's deal with NTT DoCoMo. People are talking about i-Mode taking over the world again.

But mostly it's been a case of folk looking beyond the narrow confines of mobile phones and philosophising about the bigger Internet picture. Sadly, no one seems to think WAP is as good as they themselves had cracked it up to be.

First up comes the re-reporting that "Internet mobile phones" haven't been a success with the public at large. Half the UK population have used the Internet but less than one per cent have bothered with WAP or digital TV.

This looks like as good a place as any to cock-a-snoop at IDC. In April this year it decided that by 2002 more people would be accessing the Internet by mobiles that through landlines. By 2001, every mobile phone would be a WAP phone. But just five months later, it tells the world that, actually, mobile Internet browsing would be equal to landline connection by 2004. Good to see such level-headed forward thinking.

What else? Oh yeah, Sony has produced the CMD-Z5 mobile. It's really great because it doesn't use this silly WAP protocol. Oh no, this amazing contraption works with HTML. Now why didn't anything think of that before? It is so far ahead of its time in fact that there isn't a single Internet site at the moment that it can access. Now that is ground-breaking.

AirFlash has joined with Thomson directories in its vision to build the ultimate location-based database for mobile users. We still remain unconvinced that this l-commerce malarkey is a goer but then we got trashed with the company's VP of marketing two nights in a row and if such a top man has put his career on the line for this then there must be something to it.

Also, Anywhereyougo.com found that almost 20 per cent of WAP calls were being trashed or delayed by poor WAP portals. Tell us something we don't know (actually we think we'd heard this line before - it's all becoming a bit of a blur).

Oh, and did we mention that that idiot Negroponte has now become an expert on mobiles. According to him, 3G phones just won't happen and you can get 64Kbps out of a GPRS phone. Nuff said.

Well, until next time. ®

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