Who is doing anything about making useful info available on WAP for the Third World?
The answer of course is – almost nobody. I got a Huawei G6005 recently for $30 after my 3 yr old Android ZTE Blade (tremendous machine!) got stolen at night through my window. Testing out what is possible:
1. cannot get yahoo mail. gave up trying to get hotmail or gmail.
2. cannot get twitter or facebook. get “unsupported scripts and/or out of memory” messages.
3. CAN use and navigate large parts of my own website – http://cd3wd.com/ – keep it simple stupid!
4. have tested size of web pages supported – can read 27k webpage but not 50k webpage. therefore cutoff point is somewhere in between. That is a LARGE webpage – approx 5,000 words if the htm is kept simple. and use the following code to make the webpage word-wrap within the small screen:
<html>
<head>
<meta id=”meta” name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width; initial-scale=1.0″/>
</head>
<body>
PUT YOUR STUFF IN HERE
paragraph1<br/><br/>
paragraph2<br/><br/>
paragraph3<br/><br/>
<a href=”./nextpage.htm”>next page</a>
</body>
</html>
5. Now – if we switch to discuss the possible, there is great potential for:
a. news articles, especially for “opposition” newspapers
b. classified adverts, especially for small business people
there are online newspapers in africa, and there are classified websites. but no-one I think is doing it for this low-level WAP.
And it is SO easy to do – just copy and paste the text and use basic html commands – <br/> being the best one (newline). and of course <a href=”./nextpage.htm”>next page</a> for navigation…
6. You can even put in lineage adverts in among the news and adverts….
7. Who should be doing this work? Online and print newspapers, Ministries, NGOs, iNGOs who want to help the economy grow and encourage small business.
If anybody in any country wants to do this kind of thing and needs a little help, just ask me….
Alex Weir, Gaborone, Botswana, Sunday 22 December 2013
PS – checked for long filenames up to 92 characters long – no problem
alexweir1949 
Note that the original blog and facebook entry quoted 240k as the limit. God knows how I managed to get that figure, because on re-testing under better conditions I get consistently only 27k, with 50k giving an out of memory message… – apologies! But as stated above, 27k is still a lot to play with!….