About WBMP Files
Wireless Bitmap
WBMP (Wireless Bitmap) is a monochrome image format designed for early WAP-enabled mobile devices. It stores 1-bit black-and-white images with minimal overhead, optimized for the bandwidth constraints of early mobile networks.
Family
Raster & Vector Images
Extension
.wbmp
MIME Type
image/vnd.wap.wbmp
Can Use As
HOW WBMP
CAME TO BE.
WBMP — Wireless Bitmap — was defined in 1999 by the WAP Forum for Wireless Application Protocol browsers. Pre-smartphone mobile phones (Nokia 7110 and similar) browsed the mobile web at 9.6 kbit/s on monochrome screens; WBMP provided a 1-bit bitmap format with almost no header overhead so images could fit in tiny bandwidth budgets. A typical WBMP was 50-200 bytes.
Smartphones killed WAP browsing around 2005-2007. WBMP lingered in embedded IoT displays and in some legacy B2M (business-to-mobile) SMS gateway systems. In 2026 the format is essentially dead, a monument to the monochrome-screen WAP era nobody misses.
CURIOSITIES &
TRIVIA.
WAP browsers on Nokia 7110, Siemens S35, and Motorola Timeport rendered WBMP in monochrome at 9.6 kbit/s.
A typical WBMP icon was 50-200 bytes — smaller than most text messages.
WAP 2.0 (2002) added WBMP support for color variants that hardly any phone adopted.
The WAP Forum became the Open Mobile Alliance — WBMP is one of its legacy artifacts.
SMS-to-MMS gateways used WBMP for picture messages in the early 2000s before smartphones killed the format.
STRENGTHS &
LIMITATIONS.
Strengths
- Tiny file size.
- Pre-smartphone mobile standard.
- Trivial to encode.
Limitations
- Monochrome only.
- WAP era is dead.
- Zero modern use.
Typical Sizes & Weights
Typical WBMP icon
50-200 bytes
Technical Specifications
- MIME type
- image/vnd.wap.wbmp
- Extension
- .wbmp
- Bit depth
- 1-bit
- Origin
- WAP Forum (1999)
CONVERT FROM
WBMP
Common Use Cases
Legacy mobile graphics, WAP content, retro mobile development
Related Formats
Popular comparisons
WBMP vs JPG
Differences, file size, and when to choose each format.
WBMP vs PNG
Differences, file size, and when to choose each format.
WBMP vs WEBP
Differences, file size, and when to choose each format.
WBMP vs AVIF
Differences, file size, and when to choose each format.
WBMP vs GIF
Differences, file size, and when to choose each format.
WBMP vs BMP
Differences, file size, and when to choose each format.
Popular WBMP conversions
The most-requested destinations when starting from WBMP.
Frequently Asked Questions about WBMP
Frequently Asked Questions
WBMP (Wireless Bitmap) is an image format used to store raster graphics — a two-dimensional grid of pixels describing a picture. It is part of the raster & vector images family and designed around a specific trade-off between file size, visual fidelity, and feature support (transparency, colour depth, compression type). Photographers, web designers, and content creators choose WBMP when its particular strengths match the publishing target.
Most desktop photo viewers (Windows Photos, macOS Preview, GIMP, Photoshop, Affinity Photo) open WBMP natively. On mobile, iOS Photos and Google Photos display WBMP in the gallery when supported by the OS. If the format is rare or new, convert to JPG or PNG first — both are universally readable — using our WBMP to JPG or WBMP to PNG converter.
Upload the WBMP to KaijuConverter and pick a target format (JPG, PNG, WebP, HEIC, TIFF, BMP, SVG, PDF). The conversion runs in the browser via ImageMagick and returns a download in seconds. No account or installation required; both input and output delete automatically within two hours.
It depends on the task. JPG is the smallest file size for photographs; PNG is lossless with transparency; WBMP has its own niche that may favour colour depth, animation, or encoding efficiency over one or both of those. For the final web publish, test all three and measure file size plus visible quality on real content.