What is WAP?

Phone.com later joined Ericsson, Nokia, and Motorola and founded the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) Forum. WAP is an open, global specification the purpose of which is to allow mobile users with wireless devices easy access to the wealth of information on the Internet. As part of the standard, WML (wireless markup language), a fully XML-compliant descendant of HDML, was developed to code pages for viewing via a micro-browser that resides on a mobile phone, pager or PDA. WML is gaining acceptance as newer generations of UP. Browsers continue to ship with todays phones and support both WML and HDML. 

Google's offers great support for those with WAP browsers. If you are using a WAP device when  searching, Google will not only translate the original page that you select from its search results from HTML into a WAP format, but if you select a link from that page, Google continues to translate as you make your way through the web. In addition, Google has recently completed a crawl of WML pages, and it may integrate these into its main index and ensure that they rank more highly in response to searches from those using wireless browsers.  

A relatively new product is Instant Wap, which is totally transparent to the visitor. If they view the site with conventional browsers, they see your site. If they log in from their PDA, they see the wireless version of your site. There's no need for a special "wireless URL," no need for instructions  or help pages.  

Another development tool is PenDragon Forms which  allows you to build high powered, full featured data
collection systems for Palm OS devices in minutes.  PUMATECH-Satellite Forms allows you to create PALM OS applications with "drag-and-drop" ease.  PenRight ModileBuilder is a Mobile Application Development tool specifically designed to quickly create,powerful, world class, cross-platform, custom enterprise applications forPalm OS.