WAP Vs i-Mode: The big fight

Sometime back we had discussed about the latest craze in Japan, i-Mode

phones, a service provided by NTT DoCoMo of Japan which enables wireless

Internet access. I-Mode, which has emerged as a strong contender for WAP,

has 10 million subscribers in Japan alone as compared to 3 million WAP phone

subscribers. Following its mega success in Japan, DoCoMo now wants a share in

the US and European markets, where WAP reigns. Moreover, even before the WAP

craze could catch up in India, WAP enabled phones have been drawing a lot of

flak. There are already talks of WAP dying out. So, how far are all these

statements justified?

One reason why people feel WAP phones are a big let down is that they expect

their Internet experience on the WAP phone to be similar (if not better) to that

on a PC. This expectation on the part of the users is really not surprising

largely because the hype surrounding WAP is so high that it is made out to be

something that it’s really not. And, with this kind of unrealistic

expectations, the service was bound to fall short.

But, hype aside, WAP supporters feel that from the point of view of the

requirements of people on the move, who would like to access their mail, get

stock quotes, weather reports, traffic information or conduct banking

transactions, then WAP should be able to deliver the goods. People on the go

would generally not be expected to browse the Net or read large amounts of data

or require extensive graphics.

Then again, these requirements are based on the segment of society that the

service is expecting to cater to. Considering the cost of WAP-enabled phones and

airtime as of now it seems to be slotted for the premium community, ideally

business people, managers, CEOs and the like. So, as of now these facilities may

be sufficient but as the costs are lowered and more people from all sections of

society are able to afford them, these facilities may just not be sufficient. In

the present scenario where CEO’s to teenyboppers sport cell phones, the

requirements of both these sections may be different and any technology that

caters to only a certain section of the society may just be shooting itself in

the leg. Also it is expected that within the next 1 or 2 years handhelds of

various display sizes will hit the market. So with bigger display sizes the

requirements of users could change.

Differences



The first basic difference between WAP and i-Mode is in the level of graphics
supported by the two and this is where i-Mode scores over WAP. Although WAP

supports some amount of graphics, it is nowhere near the capabilities of i-Mode

and proof of this is in the latest tie-up between NTT DoCoMo and SEGA to provide

online gaming through i-Mode phones. The main reason for this is the kind of

network the two use; WAP uses circuit switched network while i-Mode uses packet

switched data network, which is more suited to transferring data than circuit

switched networks. Also, the packet based network contributes to the ‘always

on’ nature of the i-Mode service where the user is always logged on to the

Internet. This is another aspect which goes in favor of i-Mode because the user

only pays for the data that he retrieves and not for the time that he/she is on

the Net.

But, then again as much as this goes in favor of i-Mode, this could also be

the hindrance in expanding i-Mode services to other parts of the world. Japan

uses the PDC-P network which is really not a world standard while other parts of

the world like Asia and Europe have circuit switched networks in place. This

means, even if i-Mode were to expand its services it would still have to depend

on the existing network in that country so the major drawback of circuit

switched networks still remains.

Another difference is in the markup languages the two use, i-Mode uses c-HTML

which is a subset of HTML while WAP uses WML which is a subset of XML. Although

c-HTML is similar to HTML and easier for Web designers to use, XML is considered

to be the Internet language of the future as HTML has limited capabilities. To

quote Mr Paresh Vora of Silicon Automation Systems India, "XML is more

tuned to oncoming standards as against c-HTML, so growth will be towards XML.

WML might incorporate more and more capabilities from XML. Similarly, HTML will

slowly convert itself to XML based standard." Also WAP has quite a lot of

industry backing with bigwigs like Motorola, Nokia, IBM, Intel, Microsoft,

Ericsson etc. behind this technology.

Another school of thought is that in future the two could join forces to work

out a new standard where they would be compatible. A step in this direction

could be the fact that NTTDoCoMo has become a very senior WAP forum member.

According to Mr Vora, the next version of WAP could be a combination of the two.

So a new standard might emerge where the two will be compatible and this means

good things for technology as well as mobile users.