I'm tempted to play with WAP

February 17, 2004 1:11 PM

I just switched to a new Cell Phone provider and I'm tempted to play with WAP. I have a bunch of questions to ask of anyone who's used it especialy by way of T-MObile's T-Zone service...[more]

I have no interest in buying ringtones, etc. I would like to able to check mail (on yahoo), perhaps use AIM over WAP and be able to look up tel# and theatre schedules, without getting billed beyond T-Mobile's 5 a month flat rate.
Are these goals reasonable/practical?

Are there better browsers available that enable control over cookies etc that I can download onto my phone?

Will surfing over WAP potentiallyy make my phoneknown to places I visit and subject me to recieving spam SMS (at my expense)?

Is/are there killer WAP app(s)? Have you put it to good use or is it really just a passing gimmick or novelty?

posted by Fupped Duck to Technology (6 answers total)

yep; the tzones should be unlimited, too, at this moment; when using the WAP email interface to yahoo (which you can do instead of downloading it to your phone) you don't use a heck of a lot of bandwidth (although it's not particularly practical if you get a lot of spam, because the WAP interface doesn't show sender info, etc).

the yahoo wap stuff has a movie interface as well (in fact, i think TMobile provides a movie service). Not sure on the phone numbers, but it's likely.

I was actually using my phone for a good month or two as my primary email client (no internet at the time) and it wasn't great (writing emails is *really* annoying) but worked well enough to make sure I didn't miss anything. Now that I have internet at home, I barely *ever* use my phone to do WAP stuff, but YMMV.

surfing over WAP shouldn't be a security concern, yes, there may be some browsers available for tmobile phones (i have the nokia 3650, which has the "Doris" browser for it that can do HTTP -- more of a conversation piece than a usable browser IMHO -- not sure on the third party WAP browsers).

I actually haven't found that much useful wap stuff on my phone (a lot of wap/rss pages seem to render really badly on my phone, making them really tedious to go through -- for example, it takes like, 3 minutes to scroll to the bottom of a 10 comment mefi thread on my phone). If anyone could recommend useful wap portals, that'd be helpful.

uhm. moblogging is the killer app. get yourself a picture phone, one of them photo-to-blog setups, and then start yourself a porn empire.
posted by fishfucker at 1:43 PM on February 17, 2004

Couple of things...

1] T-Mobile for now offers unlimited free WAP, as long as it's limited to email via POP3 and port 80 web surfing. (You have to call customer service and ask for "Free WAP".)

2] Subscribing to the lowest T-Zones gives you personalized content via their website, and access to AIM, plus all of the above in #1.

I'd suggest trying out the free WAP and then seeing if you really need more than that. You can always use wap.google.com or yahoo.com to do most of the looking up stuff.
posted by riffola at 2:01 PM on February 17, 2004

The free WAP can be used with AIM if your phone's AIM client can be configured to use port 80. I do this on my Pocket PC through my phone via Bluetooth.
posted by kindall at 2:41 PM on February 17, 2004

I've found WAP content to be pretty useless, but the side effect of having it provisioned into your contract is that you get GPRS activated, and with most networks you also get access to a gateway that'll put your phone on the internet.

That turns your phone into, more or less, a network device. I use that feature all the time with the POP/SMTP client built into my phone and as a PPP connection over the IR port for my Palm and laptop. That's the real killer app: not some geegaws on your phone or the un-navigable content crap, but using your phone to move actual real, live IP packets.
posted by majick at 6:45 PM on February 17, 2004

Amen majick. Getting your wap on is not that fun. Getting your GPRS on is pretty swanky. I can't tell you how to do it however, since I think it's phone and even maybe application specific. But I've got a browswer on my Blackberry and it routes over the wap to GPRS to give me real browsing.
posted by zpousman at 4:35 PM on February 18, 2004

The only killer WAP app that I've found is the Mobile Broadcast Network. When it works (which is hit or miss), you can easily burn up those night and weekend minutes listening to World Radio Network, music, and conspiracy theory talk shows.
posted by calwatch at 9:51 PM on February 19, 2004