I’m not one who believed that WAP (Wireless Access Protocol) was going to take over the world; the phone screen is too small to deliver useful content. How long this will remain true is questionable. I went down the shops recently to get a couple of phones and while the screens seem no larger, they are now multi-coloured. (You need to bear in mind, that I’ve just started to use glasses, and one of the first indicators that I needed them was that my arm had become too short to read my phone display.)
The phone however has several advantages over the laptop; you don’t have to plug it in and its boot time is much quicker. As a more mature (aka known as old) user of the internet, the choice of ringtones1 and screen savers is not really very attractive or usefull to me although I used to have “l’internationale” on the phone as my ring tone. Once we had to pay for it, I stopped. Interestingly, its jolly hard to find now; it seems to have gone from http://www.mymobile.com.
So if I’m not interested in the “yoof” phone content and use, what do I find useful, and what am I expecting from this stuff. Despite my pessimism, I have had some useful services in my WAP bookmarks page, and recently returned to the wapmarks page of my phone in order to find/use services on weather and the trains.
1. I know some people find personalised ring tones a waste of time and often offensively intrusive but I know that as an open plan office & public transport user, having a personal tone helps enormously. While working in a tightly organised team in shared office space, we even learnt each others tones, and knew whether to answer the ring or not, the same applies on the train.