8.7 Summary

8.7 Summary

8.7.1 The Future Expansion of Technology

While the present adoption of WAP technology is still evolving, future WAP telephone designs will provide the required WAP improvements. However, there is a lot of hype going full throttle that would have one believe that nearly everyone will be WAP-enabled next week. For example, the Strategis Group in Washington, D.C. predicts that the sales of handsets with microbrowsers will grow by more than 900 percent to 7.8 billion by the year 2005. They predict that by 2005, more than 9.6 million people will have subscribed to 3G networks or 2.5G mobile high-speed data services. While all of this is encouraging, we still must wait and see which WAP-based applications come to the top that will encourage the widespread use of the Internet for purely data-based applications.

There is no doubt that some form of short messaging services will continue to prevail. At present, many vendors have reported utter amazement at the sale of PDAs and other short messaging devices. For example, short messaging devices are being sold to a very large subscriber base in the teenage and young-adult market, both in the United States and in Europe. These devices have quickly replaced pagers because they now provide two-way capability.

In other information areas such as stock market quotes, weather, location services, etc., it remains to be seen how quickly these services will expand into convenience services such as banking, which is already taking hold as a Web-based service via wired access.

Another area that shows promise for the future is in vehicle systems such as wireless enhanced "smart vehicles." Such systems are already making their appearance in GPS/cellular location systems such as OnStar, which provides location and direction services, as well as basic vehicle security support.

There are a lot of novelty Web-based services that have made their appearance; however, as more WAP-based systems become available that empower the user to better navigate the business world, there will be an expanded use of WAP-based services. Further, as these services along with Bluetooth-based services become more affordable and prove to increase personal productivity, there will be an observable increase in wireless access services of all types.