Months before the capability of the wireless Web arrived, providers were promising consumers they would have the Internet in their pocket. It hasn’t exactly worked out that way. Most wireless customers are not surfing the Net with their handhelds, but they are using the e-mail and instant messaging services with gusto. “Long gone are the days where a phone serves a voice purpose,” says Vicki Soares, public relations manager for Sprint PCS. Today’s handset combines a computer and telephone to provide the utmost in mobility. All providers have plans for online access to weather, sports, news, lottery and travel information. The difference is in how personalized the use is, how much it costs, and how far it will let a user go.

Worldwide, about 40 million people are using the wireless Internet. In Japan, more than half the population uses a mobile phone, while the number of U.S. subscribers is between 35 percent and 40 percent. Sprint PCS reports it has more than 1 million mobile Web users. AT&T Wireless and Verizon Wireless have more than a million customers combined. These numbers are just a fraction of the 112 million cellular phone subscribers in the United States. “Pretty much every phone sold here now is Internet enabled,” explains Tokyo resident Chris Latko. “Since there are so many people using the online services with their phones, the value of the network is so great. It just keeps attracting people.” That attraction simply hasn’t hit the states.

Bob Egan, vice president and research director for mobile wireless at the Gartner Group, says North America’s technology just isn’t there yet. He says the popularity of the Internet is not moving in step with the predictions made in the industry. “The press at large completely overhyped this market in much the same way they overhyped the dot-com market,” he says. “There are basically a lot of people running into the mine field blind here. As the economic downturn of the market started six months ago the blindfolds came off and they found they were in pretty dangerous times. People use their cell phones and depending on their age, depending on their friends and family list, and depending on their business demands — they have very wide ranging degrees of real use.” And, unlike Soares, Egan says, their use is primarily centered in and around voice — “making phone calls.”

He says it will take time and require the maturation and naturalization of the applications and devices for the wireless Web to catch on here. Japan is so far ahead of North America because it developed around a single compatible network. In San Diego, Sprint, AT&T, Verizon, Nextel and Cingular each used different networks. Instant messaging, which seems simple enough, is made more complicated by the providers using different forums — MSN, Yahoo, AOL — that don’t allow for easy cross messaging.

Scott Fingerhut, marketing communication manager at Praja Inc., is addicted to the e-mail capability on his phone. Using a Motorola i1000 Plus with Nextel service, he watches for important or expected messages. “It has given me the ability to grab my e-mail at any time,” he says. “But replying to them is hard. I don’t do it unless it’s really important.” For this reason, most providers have created canned responses for the user to send with the push of one button. Fingerhut also uses his phone to check the San Diego traffic and follow his stocks. “In the beginning, I used it to see how far I could take it,” he says. “But punching the keypad is tough, so I bookmarked things.” He frequently uses the traffic update to get information about freeway speeds and accidents.

Wireless Web phones can visit any Wireless Application Protocol, or WAP-enabled, site. However, they can’t yet handle colors and require special coding, among other shortcomings. “It’s still very much a walled garden,” says Egan, who gets partial credit for coining that phrase about the wireless Net. “Clearly, the carriers are trying to figure out what life looks like beyond being the real bit pushers that they are and they want to bring themselves further up the supply chain. So, they have every intent in continuing to build these walled gardens of content in order to capture and continue to own the customer and the associated revenues based on the transactions that they’ll make through those wireless networks and out into the Internet.” He says the question on everybody’s mind is that while the providers know where the garden is, it’s not clear they know what the aroma should be, what color it is or what grows in different weather.

So, in an effort to draw and keep customers, providers are creating appealing packages and snazzy products. Today’s teen is tomorrow’s dedicated user, so the big attraction of the moment is interactive games. These games allow users in different countries to compete against each other or the computer in real time. The thought is to create a bond between cell phone and user to make it as necessary as a wristwatch. But teens don’t have the same disposable income of adults and may not yet subscribe to services, so the usability and attraction also has to be there for adults.

Sprint pushes its Total Digital Connection — voice command and network access. Its phones respond to the user’s voice, making it easy to dial phone numbers and perform simple functions by word identification. All of Sprint’s phones are Internet capable and the speed with which they access the Internet has just been increased to the equivalent of a 56K modem. Sherri Gilligan, area vice president for Sprint, says that to test the system, two people in her office raced to book airline tickets. “One was calling and the other was ordering on the Internet over the phone, he finished online faster and was so happy about it.”

Sprint is the only CDMA carrier to offer the PC modem card, not yet available for the Macintosh. Inserted into a laptop, the card acts as a wireless connection without a handset. This makes it even easier for travelers to connect to their office and the Internet while waiting for a flight or during a train commute. Sprint charges network users minutes from their subscription plan. “What makes it nice,” Gilligan says, “is that we provide large buckets of minutes. People don’t usually use all their allotted time.”

AT&T also does not charge minutes for wireless access, but its wireless Web services are not yet available in San Diego. Already marketing its Digital PocketNet service in Los Angeles, AT&T offers unlimited access to featured wireless Internet sites and a wireless personal organizer. AT&T deployed its data system alongside its voice system rather than on top of it so customers don’t use their voice minutes when they are visiting the more than 70 sites designed for the wireless Internet. You do, however, have to buy either the Ericsson R280LX or Mitsubishi Mobile. For easy programming, a personal Web site is provided that can be managed from phone or PC. Once available here, PocketNet will provide news and information through an agreement with a local newspaper.

Also in the works is a partnership with NTT DoCoMo, Japan’s biggest mobile phone firm. “AT&T feels content is king,” says John Mendez, AT&T manager of corporate communications and public affairs. “That’s why we’ve partnered with the king of content.” AT&T has an exclusive partnership with DoCoMo and will form Mobile Multi-Media Services, a new company dedicated to bringing wireless data to consumers. Mendez says DoCoMo has at least 18,000 content providers in Japan and uses “normal” 19.2 speeds. The partnership also will bring i-Mode handsets to the United States; here’s where the phones get better. I-Mode links users continuously to the Internet, enabling them to see animated screens, exchange e-mail, swap pictures, find restaurant guides and surf among 5,800 specially formatted Web sites without having to dial up each time. Latko already has seen the i-Mode and finds it impressive. It allows anyone with a phone to view almost any Web page on the Internet. “This gives them a huge advantage over other technologies, like WAP, that require pages to be specially built for viewing. I think with the NTT partnership in the U.S. market, there will be a lot of cool things to come out.”

No timeline has been announced for rollout of this new service, but that matters little as the rest of AT&T’s services have yet to be activated in San Diego since it took over GTE subscribers.

Already widely used in San Diego is Verizon Wireless. Verizon offered Mobile Messenger to its customers in March and representatives say it is a huge hit among all ages and groups of users. One-way messaging allows the handset to receive e-mail alerts from any Internet e-mail or news source. Two-way messaging lets the user send text messages to individuals and groups. The best thing about this service is the capability of tracking and confirmation of sent e-mails.

Verizon’s Mobile Web service is designed for personal and professional use. “The service can do a lot of things,” says Michael Finley, regional president of Verizon. “At the NCAA tournament I was sitting in the stands keeping everyone updated on all the other scores. You can really keep yourself in the know.” Sports, weather, news and financial information can be customized via a personal home page at www.myvzw.com. Companies have already found it beneficial and have developed internal sites for employee access, says Todd Hallenbeck, manager of technology solutions at Verizon. “The whole company directory can be accessed. We’ve seen businesses start to gravitate in their own direction using this.” He explains that internal databases, inventory and sales can all be tracked in real time.

Verizon reports the popularity of the Web and messaging service is about the same and that messaging, as it cuts across all demographics, is taking on a life of its own. Teens are using it to stay in touch with friends and in doing so have created their own shorthand language. Even the games have taken on a new life as Internet access has enabled interactive play between players in different cities and countries. Adults, however, use the Net more sparingly. “People tend to pick and use the same thing,” Hallenbeck says. “They are not just wandering (the Net).”

Ed Romanov, CEO at Volonet, can attest to that. His Nextel phone is Net and message enabled, and although he has tried the Internet, he finds it frustrating. “(The screens) aren’t big enough to date to do much on,” he says. Although Volonet does use the instant messaging feature on company phones for things like routing information, new customer information and staff meetings, Romanov says they keep everything brief, “no more than two or three lines.”

Cingular Wireless offers consumers My Wireless Window. Through a personal account at www.cingular.com, subscribers can customize the information they receive on their phones. For example, information on favorite sports teams, select stocks and calendar events can be personalized and updates sent to the user via text messages. Also available is instant messaging, which is integrated with MSN Messenger. As with all instant messaging, this service enables users to send and receive short messages in real time. Customers also can manage their messaging access and routing through multiple wireless devices, including cellular phones, personal digital assistants and pagers through the creation of device lists.

Newly launched is a Spanish version of the Cingular Web site: www.cingulardilo.com. Here, Spanish-speaking users can personalize Wireless Window in their language and receive instant messages in Spanish.

The future of wireless is driven by data. Big changes are just around the corner and many of them include increased speed. “The functionality is where people already want it to be,” Hallenbeck says. “Now we’ll see cosmetic changes. Screens will get bigger, there will be a full keyboard and some (phones) will be disposable.” Mendez says AT&T envisions more robust content, phones with bigger screens that use color and graphics, and streaming video. “It will all come with 3G services,” he says. “Instead of buying game stations, people will be getting games on their wireless devices.” Egan says the industry is due for a wake-up call. He is personally revolting against anything new until the industry creates a need for him to change. He says this will be done when we “move from a society that is techie to a more naturalized environment.” He explains this using a clothing analogy. “Consumers don’t want to know the chemicals and dyes that went into making a beautiful dress or pair of pants, they just want it to be a good fit,” he says. “It should be the same with technology.”