In a move that will further strengthen Jordan's place as a regional powerhouse in the emerging IT sector, MobileCom has officially launched the first commercial full Arabic Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) service to be developed in-house, Jordan Times reported Wednesday.
The Arabic service, through MobileCom's Yalla portal, required the development of a special solution to support Arabic content in UCS2 format, a format different from the one used for standard English WAP content.
Rami Zalloum, service development engineer at MobileCom was quoted by the paper as saying that “the challenge was to create a custom solution that would enable us to offer the service in Arabic without jeopardizing the quality of the service or content.”
Zalloum, a key developer of the software solution supporting Arabic, explained that “to avoid drawbacks we had to develop a solution that utilizes the capabilities of Arabic enabled WAP handsets. We can send larger articles using less bandwidth and resources, as well as reduce the download time of the articles.”
MobileCom partnered with Jordan Telecom and Agence France Presse for content and with Alladin for the portal development.
MobileCom demonstrated its Arabic WAP service in early September at MEXCOM 2000, prior to the launching of its service on September 15th, 2000 – Albawaba.com
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
