Overview

M-commerce (mobile commerce) is the buying and selling of goods and services through wireless hand-held devices such as cellular telephones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and wireless computers. 3G has opened up the wireless world because of its portability and bandwidth, making computers the one of the most popular devices for data transfer. Known as next-generation e-commerce, m-commerce enables users to access the Internet without needing to find a place to plug in. The emerging technology behind m-commerce, which is based on the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), has made far greater strides in Europe, where mobile devices equipped with web-ready micro-browsers are much more common than in the United States.

The beauty of WAP is that it is supported by all operating systems (devices include PalmOS, EPOC, Windows CE, FLEXOS, OS/9 and Java OS). WAP devices that use displays and access the Internet run what are called micro browsers browsers with small file sizes that can accommodate the low memory constraints of hand-held devices and the low-bandwidth constraints of a wireless-hand-held network. Although WAP supports HTML and XML, the WML language (an XML application) is specifically devised for small screens and one-hand navigation without a keyboard. WAP also supports WMLScript. It is similar to JavaScript, but makes minimal demands on memory and CPU power because it does not contain many of the unnecessary functions found in other scripting languages.

As the range of billing systems is made more available, freedom of choice for the end-user is growing. However, with this...