THE average mobile phone is essentially a dumb device: good for allowing people to chat, but hopeless when it comes to managing the information that makes their lives go round. For the past few years the wireless industry has been engaged in a gargantuan effort to change this. The idea is to create a single smart gadget that will allow people to check their e-mail, consult the Internet, plan their schedule and, of course, make telephone calls; in other words, a mixture of an electronic organiser, a personal computer and a mobile telephone.

Multi-purpose portable gadgets have been the staple of science fiction for ages. Now it looks as if they are turning into reality at last. NTT DoCoMo has sold more than 1m of its Internet-based i-mode phones in the six months since they were launched, and received remarkably few complaints. The rest of the world's producers are getting ready for a surge in demand as they release their products over the next few months. Motorola, for example, estimates that by 2005 the number of wireless devices with Internet access will exceed the number of wired ones. These smart new phones will not only give another boost to the sale of mobiles. They will change the nature of the Internet economy, making personal computers far less important, yet at the same time tempting many more people on to the information superhighway.

The emergence of smart phones has been partly a matter of luck—the coincidence of the development of the Internet with a vast improvement in the quality of mobile phones—and partly a matter of planning and co-ordination. Over the past few years the wireless and computer industries have engaged in a remarkable collaboration to produce the infrastructure needed for a smooth convergence between the two, resulting in an orgy of alliances involving most of the big names from the two worlds.

About 90 companies, ranging from the biggest equipment manufacturers to Microsoft, have joined the WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) Forum in order to develop a common protocol that allows users to gain access to the World Wide Web without typing fiddly letters. The Forum predicts that by 2003 as many as 525m of the WAP handsets that are just beginning to appear on the market may have been sold in the United States and Western Europe.

Over 1,000 companies have come together on another project, Bluetooth (named after a ninth-century Danish king with a reputation for bringing warring tribes together), designed to allow various wireless devices to talk to each other over infrared beams so that people can synchronise the information stored by their electronic servants. The most ambitious of these alliances is Symbian. In June 1998 Psion, a British high-tech manufacturer, signed a deal with Ericsson and Nokia in a bid to turn the EPOC operating system that drives its palm-top organisers into the de-facto standard for smart phones. Earlier this year Motorola, NTT DoCoMo and Sun Microsystems joined the consortium, followed a little later by Matsushita.

Gates at the gate

However, a ferocious battle is raging over who controls the operating system that will drive these new devices. One of the reasons for founding Symbian was to prevent Bill Gates from turning the wireless world into another part of his empire. But Mr Gates is not easily thwarted. Microsoft is doing everything in its power to ensure that Windows CE, a slimmed-down version of the system that runs most personal computers, finds its way into the world's mobile phones.

Compared with Microsoft, Psion is a slip of a thing. Its sales last year totalled $266m against Microsoft's $14.5 billion, and its performance this year has been disappointing. Microsoft is dipping into its gigantic cash reserves in order to cement relations with key cellular-network operators. It paid $600m for a 4.25% stake in Nextel Communications, an American network operator; it has also struck deals to develop wireless services for both Qualcomm, an American company that developed CDMA, and British Telecom. Acer, Philips, Daewoo Telecom, Panasonic and Vestel all use Windows CE in their more advanced phones.

But it would be a mistake to write Symbian off, given that its partners control more than 90% of the world market for mobile handsets. Indeed, in a memo to employees, Bill Gates singled out the consortium as one of the greatest threats to his empire. Psion's partners in Symbian produce 85% of the mobile phones in the world, and the alliance with Sun allows EPOC to run Java, a programming language that makes it compatible with a wide range of other digital products. Symbian is tightly focused on the wireless market; Microsoft, on the other hand, wants to turn Windows CE into the operating system for a whole range of devices, from set-top boxes for cable televisions to notebook computers. The result, say some software experts, is an operating system that is too clumsy for mobile phones.

The wireless industry has no doubt that there is a gigantic market for these gadgets. But do people really want a single device that can do everything? Most of them like their mobile phones small and their windows on to the Internet large. And is there enough bandwidth around to deliver data as well as voice? Mobile networks the world over are already struggling to accommodate the surging volume of voice traffic, and can deal with data only at a snail's pace.

3Com, the Silicon Valley-based company that makes the wildly successful PalmPilot personal organiser (soon to be spun off), is betting against the all-in-one solution, concentrating instead on ways to enable its devices to communicate with any kind of phone. Its new Palm VII takes advantage of wireless connections to the Internet—its proprietary “web clippings” technology provides access to the Internet, and its iMessenger allows users to send and receive short messages—without trying to be all things to all men. The company gives warning that “converged products” have been tried before and failed, and that what makes for a great phone does not necessarily make for a great organiser.

Its reservations are worth pondering, not least because 3Com's products have trounced Psion's in the United States and are beginning to challenge them in Europe. Smart phones got off to a bad start with the first-generation Nokia organiser, which was too bulky and expensive to win many converts. But hand-held devices are packing more and more power into less and less space. The most likely outcome, prompted by a combination of health worries (of which more later - see article) and convenience, is that people will carry two integrated devices: an earpiece for telephone calls and a hand-held device for data. Both will be powered by a small cellular receiver worn as a belt-buckle or a brooch.

Sceptics mistakenly assume that people will use their phones to browse the web in the same way that they use computers. In fact, they are much more likely to use them to exchange short messages and find specific information (unless they choose to plug their phones into their PCs and get on to the Internet wirelessly, an increasingly popular option for workers on the move). Internet content-providers are already tailoring their products for phone users: getting rid of power-hungry pictures, for example, and distilling long-winded news stories into the bald facts. Nokia has an alliance with America's CNN to provide news that has been specifically designed for phones. NTT DoCoMo reports that there are already more than 1,000 companies providing web pages for its phones. Reading the Yomiuri Shimbun on DoCoMo's i-mode phone may not be as pleasant as reading it on a larger screen, or indeed reading it in old-fashioned newspaper format. But it is not as difficult as it might sound: you simply click on whatever headline grabs your interest, and the i-mode allows you to keep up with breaking news when you are far from a newspaper kiosk.

People have already become remarkably enthusiastic about using phones to send short messages. Sonera, Finland's largest mobile network, claims that 7% of its revenue now comes from data: Finnish teenagers communicate as much by short messages (which are relatively cheap) as by talk. Across Europe as many as one billion short messages are transmitted every month. Given that today's phones suffer from slow transmission rates, small screens and clumsy keyboards, the huge popularity of short messages is surprising, and bodes well for the future of wireless text. Dataquest, a consultancy, predicts that the number of wireless data users in the United States will increase from 3m today to 36m in 2003, with numbers in both Asia and Europe even higher.

Message received

The problem of cellular gridlock is also gradually being solved. The networks are investing heavily in new capacity: AT&T Wireless, for example, is doubling its capital expenditure this year to $2 billion. They are also desperately trying to speed up their services. High Speed Circuit Switched Data (HSCSD), which is already available from some European operators and will be widely available next year, will boost rates to 57.6 kbit per second from 9.6 kbit now. General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), which will start to be introduced next year, will not only double that new speed, it will also allow devices to remain permanently online, with users billed only for the time spent receiving bursts of data. Enhanced Data Rates over GSM Evolution (EDGE) promises a quantum leap in transmission speed, increasing it to 384kbit per second, as fast as anything currently available over the wires.

The big breakthrough will come when the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) begins to distribute higher frequencies in the next few years. These frequencies will allow wireless users to transmit data at lightning speeds. They will also begin to solve one of the most irritating problems plaguing mobile users today: the fact that, because of an anarchy of standards, they are often unable to use their phones when travelling abroad.