What if you are lost thanks to an outdated map and want to generate a fresh one on the fly? Nowadays, most modern travelers, just like many others, have begun to integrate a new kind of technology into daily living: wireless computing! Gone are those days when you were shackled to the your home computer as the only source of information and computing power; instead, now we employ this newest form of computing to have computer access on a really continuous basis.

Yet wireless freaks should beware! Wireless access is still in its baby shoes, and technology is still only developing. Therefore, while a lot is available today to allow wireless access of the Internet, the access is still rather limited. In computer terms, this translates to the fact that for a device to accept Internet data from a wireless device, a certain wireless application protocol (WAP) software must be integrated into its system. By far, the most common, and cheapest, hardware that contains WAP is the cell phone technology. Cell phones now are in many ways little handheld computers.

Most cell phones offer Internet access at data transfer rates of about 14.4 Kbps at best or maybe even less - in the range of 9.6 Kbps. Computer users must remember that even dial-up Internet service normally operates at about 56 Kbps. The difference is huge, especially in the speed of the connection. Considering that websites today use copious amounts of graphics and interactive features, the length of time a that wireless user would spend while he is waiting for a page to load or a command to be executed makes it quite useless. For this reason, many websites now offer text based content only. To add to this, link rich websites can be scaled down to the bare bones of the information, and hence wireless Internet surfing is very different from the regular Internet access we are used to today.

Wireless computer access faces further limitations with regards to the display size. As computer users, we are used to 640x480 displays on a computer monitor or even on a laptop. Most cell phones only support 150x150 pixels at best, and in addition only offer monochrome displays. While the output may be a bit colorless, the input presents a whole new set of issues that will leave ‘Net junkies’ in fits of frustration. We are accustomed to the mouse or the mouse ball on the laptop, yet the average cell phone requires the use of up and down arrows, which not only gets a little frustrating but also time consuming.

For practical purposes, all this means that when we want to use a wireless network, our cell phone must connect to a gateway server that will then process the request to access a WAP supporting website. The gateway server’s main role is to translate our request to a standard HTTP address as we would use if we were using our personal computers. When the site responds to the server, it send HTML documents (remember, the content is all text!) which the gateway server will then translate into an acceptable data and route it to the nearest antenna, which then, via radio waves, submits the data to the WAP device we are using (in this case a cell phone).

This may appear complicated, yet in layman’s usage terms, this definitely means long waiting times, slow connection speed, limited content access, lack of graphics and maneuverability, and high wireless fees. While cordless devices may be desirable, the current application thereof is more than limited.