NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode portal is available in full color, while WAP is black and white - or so they say. Seriously, how can a method to lay out content and deploy it over wireless networks be color or black and white. The German Jamba.de WAP portal is already available in color, T-Mobile is working on launching color, and you can be sure that color portals and WAP sites will trickle onto the market slowly but surely. Once color phones are available for the mass market, carriers will be sure to take advantage of the feature - but until then, it's simply not necessary and will only make fewer people use WAP seeing as how downloading images is obviously more bandwidth intensive (read: slower) than downloading text only.

I think you see my point by now. NTT DoCoMo has a head start at the moment and is pulling a tremendous load by creating the market, but other carriers aren’t at a standstill. They know this is useful and they’re doing everything they can to build a very good solution. What they’ve learned though, is that they’ll make the most money if the solution they come up with works across a wide range of mobile phones and carriers. This has become very obvious through the recent introduction of the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA), which we reported about recently. This new alliance was partly born out of the WAP Forum, and it's also worth to keep in mind that NTT DoCoMo, the company that created i-mode, is part of the OMA. Anybody involved with anything wireless does not want the interoperability mess that occurred when Nokia created its proprietary SMS solution for allowing logos and ringtones to be sent to their mobile phones and none others again - and that's what the OMA is all about, put in the most simplistic way.

If you now realize that in the not too distant future, color displays, polyphonic ring tones, J2ME, MMS and WAP 2.0 will all be a lot more common than today, the difference between i-mode and WAP melts away.

In that sense, AT&T Wireless also made the right choice by basing their mMode service on WAP instead of i-mode and getting rid of the license fee NTT DoCoMo charges for i-mode - and at the same time ensuring their customers could have a wider range of handsets to choose from.

The Sony Ericsson T68i already supports WAP 2.0. The Sony Ericsson P800 will too. The Nokia 9210i and 9290 Communicator models come with an Opera browser which supports xHTML and WML. The Nokia 7650 has WML now and will have WAP 2.0 in future versions. Any device based on Symbian 7.0 will have WAP 2.0 support, and at the end of this year there will be quite a few phones on the market supporting the standard.

To end my small rant with a quote; "People must come to things in their own time, in their own way, for their own reasons, or they never truly come at all." - Dee Hock.