Windsor UMC on your cell phone or PDA

Do you have an internet enabled cell phone or PDA? If so, you can now get some information about the activities and location of Windsor United Methodist Church on these handheld devices. At the moment there is only a small amount of content for these devices, but more will be coming along. If you are trying to find Windsor UMC, the driving directions are available via the wireless web.

Some PDAs and cell phones can access the Web through a wireless connection to an Internet Service Provider (ISP). One of the current problems is that these services have yet to be fully standardized. Most Web browsers available for PDAs can handle only relatively simple (and short) HTML documents (normal web pages). Many do not handle graphics or convert graphics to black and white. There are some PDA browsers that can handle both HTML and WML/WAP (see below) as well as some color graphics if the PDA supports color.

On the cell phone side there are still competing formatting technologies: WML (Wireless Markup Language running through WAP (Wireless Application Protocol); HDML (Handheld Device Markup Language) using Openwave's Handheld Device Transport Protocol (HDTP), instead of WAP; and NTT's DoCoMo i-mode service, available only in Japan. HDML and i-Mode are proprietary approaches to providing web services over wireless phones, while WML/WAP is supported by a wide variety of manufacturers and is rapidly becoming the most widely deployed system.

Problems with handheld devices on the Web include relatively slow communications speeds (although this is changing), and limited display space (which requires a little different approach to formatting than do standard Web pages). We have provided two alternatives here: First, content delivered through WML/WAP, and HTML pages optimized for handheld devices. You may access these resources through the following URLs:

http://windsornj.org
   /windsornj/wireless
   /wap/index.wml
http://windsornj.org
   /windsornj/wireless
   /html/index.htm

If you have handheld devices that can connect to the Internet, try these URLs. If you do not have such a device, you can download several different Phone/PDA emulators that will run on a PC. With these emulators you can get a feel for the way in which information is displayed on a handheld device.

Click here for a more detailed treatment of the issues involved with wireless web services and for links to software and services.