Palm Computing’s move to embrace the wireless application protocol (WAP) community shows how the balance of power has shifted in favor of wireless network carriers in the nascent wireless mobile device market. The 3Com Corp subsidiary – which has a 72% share market in the handheld PC market – had tried to go it alone in the wireless market, launching Palm VII, which uses Palm’s own technology for converting web pages so they can be read on the small screen devices. However, in joining the WAP forum and licensing Phone.com Inc’s WAP microbrowser, Palm is showing that it knows the way the wind is blowing in the handheld market.
AT&T, Sprint Corp, UPC, Alcatel NV and many other carriers worldwide are planning to roll out WAP services over the next year. Palm says that it has decided to go the WAP route so that handset manufacturers can develop mobile phones based on the Palm operating system. Already, Alcatel and Palm are looking to integrate GSM phone and Palm organizer functions.
Without WAP support, the future of the Palm platform would be less than assured. In this business, the carrier calls the shots, says Seamus McAteer, director of web strategies at Jupiter Communications. They’re doing what they have to do to get business. The industry and the analyst community all now appear to believe that WAP is the way forward for mobile wireless devices, he says. Ben Linder, VP of marketing at Phone.com Inc – one of the original members of the WAP forum – claims that the protocol will be a very strong force in the industry. The company, which was formerly called Unwired Planet Inc, has sold its WAP server software to 31 network operators worldwide. There are 140 members of the WAP forum. Research firm Strategy Analytics Inc expects that over 500 million WAP-enabled handsets will be shipped between now and 2003.
However, despite the momentum building up behind WAP, Palm still claims that it will stick with ‘web clipping’ for handheld organizer-sized devices. Peter Richardson, principal analyst for mobile communications at Dataquest, takes Palm’s moves towards WAP as a admission that web clipping is, at best, a stop-gap before WAP services come online. Web clipping wasn’t the way to go, he said, but points out that a realistic global WAP service is at least a year away. So Palm has an interim service in web clipping, which is supplied over BellSouth’s mobile network, although this only covers the US. Palm says that it is examining the possibility of launching the Palm VII on a more global basis.
