Although smart phone competition among iPhone, Droid, Nexus One, Blackberry, and Palm Pre is red hot, not everyone has a smart phone and actually most people still use simpler and much cheaper phones. According to New York Times article Firms Selling Apps for Simple Phones,"roughly 82 percent of cellphones in use are limited-function phones, the kind that typically sell for less than $50 or are given away with a two-year service contract."
These traditional phones can also access Internet. In Asian coutnries like China, WAP is still very popular to access Internet. So what is WAP? Here WAP stands for Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), not Wireless Access Point. It is a suite of protocol of wireless communications. It usally runs on 2G mobile network, like GSM, CDMA, and GPRS.
What is the difference between WAP and GSM/CDMA? Using analogy, some people consider GSM/CDMA as highway and WAP as vehicle on the highway. Using more technical terms (TCP/IP and OSI), GSM/CDMA provides lower level data link/physical layer and WAP provider higher layer (UDP, HTTP) and some a markup language WML (Wirless Markup Language), similar with HTML.
People can use WAP to browse websites, check emails, track sports scores, etc. In Japan, NTT DoCoMo offers i-mode as a competitor of WAP. But KDDI and SoftBank mobile use WAP.
Do not be confused about WAP and WAPI. What is WAPI? WAPI stands for WLAN authentication and Privacy Infrastructure and is the Chinese version of Wi-Fi. Chinese government required handset manufacturers to support WAPI if Wi-Fi is supported on cell phones. In 2009, it was a big issue when Apple iphone planned to enter Chinese market. When China Unicom introduced iphone in China later, iphone has neither Wi-Fi nor WAPI functionality, although it is reported that iphone with Wi-Fi and WAPI will be on the market in 2010.
BTW, what is the difference between WAP and Wi-Fi? Again, Wi-Fi is a data link layer and provides a data highway so that data can be communicated using TCP/IP protocol. In some sense, WAP can be considered as the counterpart of TCP/IP, and GSM/CDMA, which under the WAP, as the counterpart of Wi-Fi.
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Maybe another good way to simplify what's going on is to compare WAP with WEB.
WEB = a set of protocols and standards for showing content from the internet on a PC. WEB is what people think of when browsing their favorite websites, such as google, facebook etc.
WAP = a set of protocols and standards for showing content from the internet on a cellular phone. WAP is specifically designed to use less resources (memory, speed of internet connection, small screen) to be usable on wireless devices. WAP is a watered down and then improved version of WEB that includes other things important on a wireless device (such as WAP PUSH that allows to push content over SMS to a WAP enabled device, and WAP Gateway usage which enables carriers to separately charge for WAP use and WEB use on a handset etc.)
And the newest thing is to have WEB on Smartphones. As phones are more powerful and have bigger screens, they can now show regular WEB pages on them (in addition to WAP pages if the browser on the device supports both, which many do not or only do partially).
You can test WAP on your PC too, with the Winwap browser for Windows available at www.winwap.com
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