Wireless Web -- Phone Tips

Get Real-time Wind data and Forecasts on your cellphone! To access our wireless web info, you need a wireless web-enabled cellphone or PDA with an active wireless web ("mobile web") access plan from your cellular phone provider. Once you have that ready:

To learn more about Wireless Web, see these links when you're done with the current page:
Wireless Web Basics
FAQ: Wireless Web Frequently Asked Questions

How to test your cellphone:

1) Go to wap.iKitesurf.com -- type this special URL into your web-enabled phone.

2) Log in -- with your regular Username and Password.
Get free trial account.
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2) Select the "Wind Reports" Option -- Select "Wind Reports" by using scroll buttons and hit OK.

3) Choose region. Select region by scrolling or keying in associated number.

4) Wind Reports Summary -- The Wind Report Summary displays latest wind direction and average wind speed. Select an individual site to get a detailed wind report. ** If you are able to see this page, but no wind data (numbers) are displayed: your phone works ! All you need to do is upgrade to Wireless Web Membership to access the wind data (numbers).

Tips to streamline your Wireless Web use

1. After you log in, you will remain logged in until you click "log out". When you are done with your session, go back to the homepage and then just hang up. On many phones, the next time you return to the web function you'll boot up right at our homepage - no need to log in each time. (After you hang up, you shouldn't be incurring air time charges because you will have *hung up* the phone, but our system will still consider you to be "logged-in" since you never officially logged out.)

2. MAKE OUR SITE YOUR HOMEPAGE OR BOOKMARK. Some users may be able to bookmark wap.iWindsurf.com on their phones, to save time in the future. Some phones also allow you to set your homepage to wap.iWindsurf.com (call your phone provider for details).

3. Be sure to customize your Wireless Web to get all your favorite wind reports and forecasts in one place. Once you customize your wireless web MyWind page, you’ll be able to simply hit “1” after logon to bring up your myWind page. To customize, follow this link.

Technical Information

DIFFERENT PROVIDERS & DIFFERENT PLANS
Depending on your cellphone provider of choice, your fees and access to the wireless web/mobile web may be based solely on minutes used, a certain number of minutes may be included, or in some cases the amount of data you transfer may be what is counted. For more information on this topic, please contact your cellphone/PDA provider, and for some basic info, please see our FAQ:
FAQ: Wireless Web Frequently Asked Questions

WIRELESS WEB PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
The Wireless Web "standard" is so non-standard that it's difficult to support all phones a-priori. This is a problem within the industry that all wireless web programmers face. It is getting better, but slowly. Ideally we'd need a team of people to be constantly acquiring new phones as they come out, testing them against our WAP site for compatibility, and augmenting the site appropriately. Since that's obviously not practical for us, we've adopted a strategy that supports most phones out there now, and allows us to add support for new phones as required or requested by our customers.

On the regular web, there is basically one language that all browsers understand: HTML. On the wireless web, there are three languages that are all part of one "standard" or another: HDML (Handheld Device Markup Language), WML (Wireless Markup Language), and xHTML (eXtensible HyperText Markup Language). Some phones also recognize regular HTML and even plain text.

Some phones support one or the other language, some more than one. However, even if two different phones both support WML, for example, the features within WML are usually not supported equally (just like two different browsers or browser versions on the regular web that support HTML may not support features equally within HTML). On the regular web, a browser that encounters code it doesn't understand will usually just ignore it, and still display the page the best it can. On the wireless web, the microbrowsers in most phones have less space for error-handling than desktop applications. Consequently, microbrowsers are much less forgiving, causing an error for the slightest deviation from the syntax it is programmed to understand (which may or may not conform to the "standard").

Hence, we've designed our WAP site to deliver all three formats, depending on which phone you have. Within each format, we try and use only the "lowest common denominator" set of commands to avoid parsing and syntax errors. HDML is still served as the default format, since it is still the lowest common denominator in about 75% of the phones out there, and it actually looks and functions better than WML on many phones that support both. We have done and continue to do our best to serve the right content to the right phone. New phones come on the market so fast, though, that it's difficult to keep up.

If you have been successful reaching the wireless website but are getting "content" or "parsing" errors, we may not be serving the right content to your phone. Use this link to let us know: (1) your username, (2) your service provider, (3) your phone make, AND (4) your phone model. Once we have that information, and can learn what format your phone requires, you should be good to go.