News Item: WAP is Dead
Where JAMDAT’s use of capital didn’t contribute to its success, the fault lies not in execution, but in being too early: JAMDAT was an early participant in mobile entertainment – before mobile handsets were ready to support BREW and J2ME applications. WAP games such as Gladiator were JAMDAT’s first foray into mobile games.
You might expect there to be some WAP revenue in the picture, especially in light of the huge numbers JAMDAT Bowling continues to produce. But according to the S-1:
We derived… 97% of our revenues during the three months ended March 31, 2004, from a combination of BREW and Java applications.
Yes, if you hadn’t heard, WAP is dead.
posted by Zigurd @ 5:27 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
I think it's worth pointing out that a declaration of WAP's "death" is misleading if taken out of the context of mobile gaming. WAP will continue to be an important part of mobile telecomms for a long time to come. Its suitability for gaming (at the time JAMDAT used it) may have been slim, but WAP is not - nor was it designed to be - a platform for gaming applications. Comparing it to the likes of BREW is comparing apples with pears.
Fair enough - WAP isn't dead for information delivery. But WAP is a miserable medium for accessing random information, too. That is why Handmark and Macromedia and others, no doubt, are taking a whack at providing alternatives.
The turning point will be where such alternatives start to be built into phones, and we get an alternative portal start page presented by the MNO, that takes advantages of the speed and media-richness such alternatives should provide.
Nah, WAP is dead!!
One of the major carriers in New Zealand is very reluctant to publish anything that is WAP. This is from bad user experiences with the slowness of WAP.
As a developer they ask us to provide stuff as J2ME applications, which suits me better than WAP anyway.
Sure WAP may be fine to a developer, but it is frustratingly slow for the end user to enjoy, esp. when they experience BB connections on their desktop.
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