that's right - they use iMODE on the DOCOMO mobiles. iMODE and
WAP seem to have that in common: a non-IP radio link protocol
and an application gateway. Of course, this limits the applications
to those that can be "translated" in the gateway, while an end to
end system (such as the Ricochet from Metricom) would allow
essentially any application on an Internet server to interact
directly with the mobile device because the gateway would merely
be an IP level device, possibly with NAT functionality.
With a JAVA interpreter or other similar capability in the
mobile, one could imagine considerable competition for development
of new applications. As it stands, only the applications NTT
chooses to implement in the translating gateway are accessible.
Since HTTP is one of the "applications" served, there is still
a lot of room for competition, I suppose.
vint
At 02:53 PM 4/30/2000 +0859, Masataka Ohta wrote:
>In Japan, there are more than 5 million non-IP mobile WWW browsers
>served by a single application gateway.
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