In the beginning of my education in wireless, I was awhirl with all the technology and learning the differentiation of the tech and which was the best and which was going to be the best.  My target technology as Venk calls it is the detached Palm.  This is any Palm that doesn't have a connection to the Internet.  In programming for this very rapidly moving environment, I have become intrigued with the staying power of the different technologies.  It's clear to everyone that we are heading to a wireless world.  Of course, this will not be a totally wireless world, but a hybrid of land lines and mobile devices.  I, for one, would love to have a mobile device and then wouldn't have to sit here in front of a monitor and keyboard typing all of this in.  I could be in, say, Bali and uploading my web pages from there and nobody would be the wiser.  Truly, I could do all of my work remotely if I had a decent enough connection to the Internet and a cell phone that sounded like I was right next door.  I realize this is a reality for some tech snobs already, but most of us don't have this luxury yet.

What I've described above is exactly what people want, I'm not that out of the ordinary in my idea of the future of wireless.  The real question is how do we get there?  

That's why I specifically chose the term mobile devices in my description above.  I am certain that we don't want to be coding, writing, or graphic editing on a phone.  So what are we left with?  Well, something like a laptop.  It'll be changed -- lighter, more rugged, and the ability to easily make phone calls and connect the Internet.  But wait!  Now we've encountered a problem.  How are we going to make a call over wireless?  On a land line, we sit in front of our computers and use our modem to connect to a like or compatible modem communicating over TCP/IP.  In the future, we will have to communicate over wireless.  This is where WAP comes in to save the day.  A nice thin client protocol readying us for low data transmission over weak CPU'ed clients.  Perfect, right?

But wait?? Isn't G3 right around the corner?  In two years (supposedly) we are going to have massive rollout of broadband for wireless devices, well over 100Kbps will be capable.  And if you know where to look, you can find G4.  So in a matter of years, we're right back where we started from in bandwidth and the Band-Aid of WAP is already surpassed.  If that's the case, then why bother changing protocols at all?  TCP/IP, while not necessarily the best of protocols, is certainly battletested.  Why change over to another completely new protocol that isn't even backward compatible with something as simple as HTML?  Could it be that there is a financial interest backing this initiative??  No need to hear it from me folks, read for yourself, Rohit Khare has an excellent analysis on the greed and company motivation backing this initiative.

Particularly interesting in the above article is the licensing and royalties paid on every single WAP device on the planet.  The numbers certainly add up quickly.

So what are big businesses really doing to get wireless devices on the web?  Our two major PDA makers are avoiding it altogether, with Microsoft creating their own standard (of course) and Palm working with their own proprietary communication over UDP and CDMA.  Here is another article titled WAP is a Trap.

Another page to reference is by Angus where he talks about the replacement of WAP with GPRS in the US.  While reading this, please remember that many consider the natural evolution of GPS to be GPRS.  This means Europe will develop this way.

As can be easily derived, WAP is a protocol being marketed for the leverage of the WAP companies involved to lock products into their own proprietary patented system.  It is a protocol that will be outdated before it is even fully rolled out.