From The Editor

Palm Web Access: A Tower Of Babel?

Despite the short-term success of the Palm VII and the relatively wide variety of PQAs available for it (MapQuest, E*Trade, The Weather Channel, and Yahoo! to name a few) one has to wonder about the long-term viability of this technology. As you might expect, web clippings are formatted using a subset of HTML. In addition, data is compressed when sending and receiving and can be encrypted using the elliptic- curve technology from Certicom (more on that in another column!). If all this sounds a bit similar to WAP, I have to agree with you. Do we need yet another Web-based display technology? Microsoft's recently announced Mobile Explorer also supports a subset of HTML...and no WAP (although WAP support is planned for a release later this year).

Palm and Microsoft are members of the WAP Forum and obviously made a market decision to ignore WAP for now. This might tell us something about the state of WAP, minus the hype. I think it says that for North American customers (the primary user base of the Palm VII), WAP technologies are still far enough off in the distance that they can be safely dodged for now by product developers. The better question is "Why"? I don't see the end user difference between formatting the display list boxes, buttons, and images in WML versus web clippings or repurposed HTML. Why not jump in feet first and position your platform for ubiquity in the years to come by providing support for both numerous wireless networks and industry markup standards?

In reality, I understand that these products are initial salvos into what will eventually be a very large market. I do have a nagging feeling, however, that this may be a sign of things to come After a few years of relative information nirvana (thanks to the generally agreed-upon Web standards such as HTML and HTTP), will the wireless world return us to a fractured technological state with devices all wandering around using their own "standards"? The wide variety of environments and technologies does allow vendors a convenient excuse for pursuing proprietary enhancements. The Web was the great equalizer in the desktop world, but will it be enough to force uniformity in the wireless world? I'd like to believe that market demand will force this but at the current time I simply see all of the major vendors marching in opposite directions. Forget stock quotes and traffic updates...the killer app for this industry will be the unifying solution that forces the industry to march in lockstep to meet overwhelming market demand.