lumrant
Wednesday, February 04, 2004
Still screwing around with my new Verizon phone. It's paying off a little bit; for one thing, I found that I can access the Web for free and don't have to pay Verizon a goddamned cent for this privilege! Guided by this and other Web content, I have set up my phone to use a free WAP proxy, and indeed things seem fairly good. Good enough that I called Verizon today and told them to shut off my (now pretty much worthless) MobileWeb service, which was going to cost me $5/month otherwise.
The down side is that, other than the obvious things like managing a home page full of customized links, there must have been some other subtle things that their damned proxy did for me, because my phone now refuses to load up certain sites that it used to be able to load--for instance, http://www.etrade.com . Now I get all kinds of messages like "too many redirects" and "text content" and other such crap whose causes I suppose I'll have to explore more deeply. I suppose my dreams of trading thousands of shares of NATI at the press of a few keypad buttons are going to have to wait...
Why, you may ask, do I care about Web access on my phone? Well, it's mostly because it's there. I mean, I like the concept of always, in principle, having some device handy that I can use to access the Web. I've done stupid things like send e-mail and check the weather. My dream is to be able to quickly pull up the show times of my local movie theater at the drop of a hat, so that Jeanie and I can make instantaneous decisions to go see movies whilst driving or eating or whatever. Sadly, Yahoo's movie site is one of the damned WAP services that doesn't seem to work properly on my phone now that I've ditched the Verizon WAP proxy! I must either locate an alternative or else figure out the problem here. If nothing else, my screwing around has at least kept me vaguely close to the cutting edge of wireless. I now know a small about of WML!
Without further ado, here's my exciting homepage--the one I see now when I fire up the old 4400's Web browser--which is hosted on the www.johnandjeanie.com site:
http://www.johnandjeanie.com/wml/lumwap.wml
(see emulated version)
Note that you need some sort of WAP emulation to be able to see it properly, and IE surprisingly doesn't have that built in. The Opera browser does have it, and there are also third-party tools out there to view WML pages. Or, you can fire it up on your own mobile phone, if you can figure out how to load an arbitrary Web page. That was another huge annoyance I ran into: my goddamned phone's Web browser does not include any sort of default function to "load URL," forcing me to resort to making the Google WAP site (which has such a utility) my homepage until I added "load URL" functionality to my own WML homepage.
This really is still the infancy of wireless Web access on small devices, and it's certainly possible that there will not be any adolescence. Instead, small devices might get good enough to use regular old HTML more effectively. In the meantime, though, it's wretched how the various wireless service providers are charging John Q. Public $5 a month for this "added" benefit. It makes me realize how lucky we are in the US to have such low-cost Internet access; they're not so lucky in other parts of the world, and I figure it would have been the same here if the whole movement hadn't been driven at the university setting.
