Why mobile apps don't stack up: mobile data last year generated $32 billion worldwide, but for consumers, mobile interoperability still sucks. The good news is, operators have elbowed their way into the game. The bad news is, the game's just started.(Cover Story)

Wireless Asia, September, 2003 by Clark, Robert

The story of the wireless sector in the past four years has been the attempt to combine new technology and changing consumer behavior into a lucrative new world of rich content and applications.

The story is as complex as the new business model itself. It also seems that for every positive action to push forward the mobile data sector, there is an opposite (and sometimes equal) reaction. For every item of good news, there's some bad news.

It begins at the height of the Internet gold rush. Just as the HTML Netscape browser ignited the Internet boom, the WML WAP browser was expected to do the same for the wireless Internet. WAP developers and operators rushed into the breach to replicate the online Internet.

But when users finally got their...

Read the rest of this article with a Free Trial at HighBeam Research.

Premium Content Partnership | HighBeam Research provides an in-depth online archive library of reference works.