Philip Greenan wrote:
>
> Tony, this is a very interesting mail.
>
> Could I ask you did you notice an improvement in the time it takes to access
> WAP sites when you started using a GPRS enabled handset ?
>
> One of the vaunted reasons for i-mode superiority over circuit-switched WAP
> is speed of access to content from clicking the handset until the content
> arriving back, am interested in what you perceive as a user in HK. How many
> seconds does it take typically for a response ?
Hi Philip,
I have to confess that I haven't tried out a GPRS phone in Hong Kong.
Despite repeated request to operators for a test model, none have been
able to spare one for me to test. However, I did try out Hutchison
Telecom's CDMA (IS-95B) handset which supports packetized connections at
14.4 kbps a couple of months back. The response time was still pretty
slow, although much faster than circuit-switched WAP - I think 4-6 sec
is about the right range. But the content (WAP-based) was disappointing
(mostly text and info only). The navigation on the service was also a
mess, having to go back and back and back to get into previous menus.
I also tried out i-mode in Japan a couple of months back on a 501 (i
think) from Sony - it had a color screen and was a fold up type, and the
performance was still not instantaneous (4-6 sec), but the content was
much richer and I assume, although I don't read Japanese, more
attractive to users.
More interesting, I was shown a WAP application by a company called,
Infinite - they have changed their name to something else, but I'm too
lazy to check, that connected to their corporate WAP gateway and to
their internal servers, which although it took some time, made much more
sense since the person was accessing his corporate email. So maybe the
speed isn't that important as long as the application is right.
Other factors that might be hindering the performance of WAP could be
the fact that it doesn't support a graphical user interface, or content
download yet (hence the recent M-services initiative by GSM operators),
or that there are many more handset types in the WAP universe so that
applications have to seek and find out what screen size and resolution
to format a page for, leading to delays in performance. Of course this
is all speculation on my part since I don't do any programming or Web
development and can only rely on the information that other people tell
me. Perhaps someone can verify.
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Received on Tue Jul 3 14:23:51 2001