WAP Cell Phone - Navigation

Access the mobile web has had a humble beginning in the form of WAP and microbrowsers based standard. The WAP was based on the idea of creating simplified versions of web pages, adapted to low-resolution screens and the low processing power of the first apparatus. Instead of pages with many links and long texts, the WAP pages should be very simple, containing only some specific information.

In 1998, when it was published the original pattern, the idea seemed to make sense, since in addition to all the limitations of equipment, the technology of transmission still crawling, with predominance of the CSD, which will slow (9.6 K), was still rate per minute, the same as a voice call.

Besides all the technical constraints, the WAP content needed to be generated manually, which created a problem of the egg and the chicken, where almost nobody WAP content produced by few players and that there existed a few readers that there was no content. This combination of factors that made using the WAP was a limited experience, expensive and frustrating.

With GPRS, things improved, but the use of WAP remained weak. Rather than adapt the pages to the devices, the mobile browsers have evolved to optimize the display of pages to the size of the screen, simplifying the layout or using a navigation system in miniature, where the visualization is facilitated by displaying a thumbnail of the page.

The work of a mobile browser is much more complicated than might appear at first sight, since, in addition to smaller screens, numeric keypads, no mouse and other limitations, the smartphones have much less processing power than a typical desktop. If you have the curiosity to try to navigate using Firefox (or another modern browser) on any old PC, such as a Pentium MMX or K6-2 with 32 MB of RAM, you will see that even the simple act of opening the browser and load a simple page is a challenge in these machines. Try to open pages heavy or watching videos on YouTube then it is a task almost impossible.

On a smartphone, the hardware resources available are not very different than a PC in the past decade. Most current devices use ARM9 or ARM11 processors 200 to 400 MHz, with 64 or 128 MB of RAM (not to be confused with the Flash memory used for storage, which can be much higher), and much of the available memory is consumed by the operating system, leaving only a few tens of megabytes to use the browser. What's more, there remains the problem of energy consumption, which should also be taken into account.

While a browser for desktops (such as Firefox) can easily consume 200 or 300 MB of RAM when browsing with multiple tabs open, the mobile browsers need to work within limits much lower, 20 MB, 8 MB, 5 MB or only 1 MB of RAM. With this, developers are required to optimize the code and adopt creative solutions to improve performance, while they need to worry about adding support for CSS, javascript, flash and all the other technologies currently used, which leads to huge differences in performance between browsers and resources available. Let's a summary of options: