Racing for the top spot
The reason recruiters and executives have become so enamored with wireless programmers--and with those who don't yet have experience in the skill--is simple: Whoever hires the best programmers is most likely to produce the best product. Whoever produces the best product is also a likely contender to become the industry standard in the hot wireless handheld market, a lucrative position as market share increases.
And that opportunity is wide open. To date, no single browser has been adopted as the standard for accessing the Internet from mobile devices.
"The same browser wars that took place with Mosaic and Netscape years ago, those are the browsing wars that are taking place in the wireless world today," said Don Shirley, CEO of Brightpod, an application service provider for wireless software products. "It's really not clear yet which of these browsing standards are going to come out on top, but clearly there needs to be one."
Without a single standard, companies that develop software applications and other technology must make programs compatible with each of the different browsers and operating systems. Having one or two standards would make this process much simpler.
"If we have an application that we would like to use drop-down dialogue bases, today's WAP phones typically don't have enough display to support those features, so we have to move from drop-down features to menu boxes even though most PDAs have plenty of space," Shirley said. "If we're trying to create applications for all the platforms, we have to operate in the lowest common denominator."
Some of the popular wireless browsers include Pocket Internet Explorer for the Microsoft Pocket PC operating system; WAP (wireless application protocol), used by most of the major cell phone manufacturers; UP, developed by Phone.com; I-mode, developed by NTT DoCoMo; Blazer, developed by Bluelark Systems to run on the Palm OS; and AvantGo, which comes with many Palm devices and also as a link on Pocket PC
