I’m embracing a heap of new things that I can now do with my mobile, from checking out the weather, to using my mobile for directions instead of carrying an A-Z and checking my Facebook account when I’m waiting for a bus, but best of all I do this without going to the WAP portal on my mobile. It now seems a bit pedestrian and archaic to click on the little globe on my mobile to watch it whirl (and whirl…) and wait for the page to appear.
WAP pages are pretty crowded and clunky places with little personalisation so it presents me with a lot of things that i’m not really interested in. Unless buying a game or ringtone I find the experience quite underwhelming not to mention chaotic.
But, back to the beginning of my story about using apps and accessing info but not via WAP. And, wait for it, I don’t have an i-phone. I’m using an app to access my apps! I have a dedicated icon on my mobile screen that contains a host of daily apps, such as news, twitter, facebook and maps. When it’s open, my mobile actually looks uncannily like an i-phone and is much, much faster, easier and intuitive to navigate than WAP. All of the applications are cached so I’m using less data, which makes it faster and cheaper to use plus, as it’s server based with just a thin client on my phone, it offers greater computing power to run more complex applications. I can also play games on the tube, as it works in offline mode too.
You may not be surprised to learn that what I am using is a hot new application from Retalika. WAP (sometimes nicknamed “Wait And Pay”) has been around since 1997 so it’s not surprising that a new generation technology has come along at last.
On top of the speed and usability benefits of the Retalika solution, a big advantage is that the application is integrated with my mobile operating system so for example is able to reuse my contacts and send me alerts. This makes it very easy and seamless. The old slow standalone WAP solution seems like a dinosaur.
So, will your WAP habits change?
