Over the coming year, do not be surprised to see more and more people looking at their mobile phones, rather than just talking into them. Until now, accessing the Internet has usually meant sitting at a desk with a PC, but new technology means that instead of you visiting the Net, the Net can come to you.

The standard that enables this to happen is called the wireless application protocol, or WAP, and is expected to become the norm on most new mobile phones in the near future. It is leading to phones with bigger graphical displays and scrolling devices, and mobile users can expect a host of extra services.

Those services are already commencing. Among the first mobile operators to offer WAP services is France's SFR, with 400 people taking part in WAP trials since last October. The commercial service, announced last week at the GSM World Congress in Cannes, starts on March 26th, and involves local mobile manufacturer Alcatel, whose One Touch Pocket phone uses software provided by WAP pioneer Unwired Planet of Redwood, California.

Unwired Planet also conducts WAP trials using its server in California, with similar services to those which SFR will offer later this month. A week of test driving these services was enough to give a good overview of what WAP has to offer, as well as enough to run up a hefty phone bill as each data call is charged as a voice call.

Many of the services offered on the tiny, menu-like interface are handy, but better served by the Web as we are used to it (after all, you can get a lot more on to a laptop screen than on to a mobile phone screen).

But there might be times when users want to book cinema tickets, query bank accounts, or access stock quotes while on the move, so these WAP services will undoubtedly be useful. find use.

Much more useful from a mobile perspective were weather forecast services and www.trip.com's flight tracker service which allows you to query the status of flights with information straight from the aeroplane's transcoder.

Waiting for colleagues in Nice airport last week, for example, the WAP service showed their flight from London had 17 minutes to go, and was travelling at 660 miles per hour.

Perhaps more useful again was a traffic information site called Webraska. Using sensors along roads, Webraska gives an up-to-date graphic representation of traffic conditions on major roads in France. This could be very useful, for example, if you drove into unexpected traffic congestion and wanted to find out how far in front of you the road was congested.

Naturally, WAP also allows e-mail access, but even with Unwired Planet's smart typing option whereby it guesses the most likely letters, typing text from a mobile phone's keypad is not fun.

Unwired Planet, which started up in 1995, was a founder of the WAP Forum in 1997, together with Nokia, Ericsson, and Motorola. Mr Malcolm Bird, managing director of Unwired Planet Europe, said the company's first WAP service was launched by AT & T with the nation-wide "PocketNet" service in the US.

Mr Bird explained that although WAP is currently using a comparatively slow 9,600 bits-per-second data channel, this speed is adequate as most WAP pages contain a lot less data than their Web equivalents. He also stressed that WAP used similar security to Web interfaces (secure sockets layer, or SSL), and would get even faster as mobile networks and phones upgraded data services over the coming years.

Nokia agrees, calling WAP the "common platform for the delivery of GPRS services. GPRS, or generic packet radio service, will offer data rates of above 100 kilobits per second in about a year's time. The world's leading supplier of mobile handsets and network equipment last week unveiled its first WAP phone, the Nokia 7110, which will go on sale this summer.

Nokia developed its own WAP software, and the first indication of the services it intends offering was a deal with CNN Interactive to supply a news feed. Mr Mark Bernstein, general manager of CNN Interactive, said the company was talking to nine mobile operators worldwide, and predicted eight million customers by the end of this year.

One of the big unknowns about WAP is how much operators will charge to use it. Many industry insiders suggest operators are bewildered, as they are more used to charging for voice call minutes, and do not know how to charge for data. While AT & T is charging a flat $30 (€27) monthly fee for WAP access, France's SFR seems less sure of its charging plans.

SFR's product development director, Mr Christophe Francois, said the company would charge in the region of 1Ffr (15 cents) to 4Ffr per WAP service request (per page of data). In addition, users will pay for calls, charged at usual GSM voice-call rates.

Furthermore, SFR's service, called e.media, only offers access to a fixed set of services, and when asked whether SFR was charging content providers to be among the services, Mr Francois said: "Those are difficult questions."

According to Unwired Planet, operators are still testing the market to see how much customers are prepared to pay for WAP services. Nonetheless, SFR predicted its service would reach 100,000 users within six months.

While the idea of Internet access in your hand is a marketer's dream, others feel the real potential of WAP is in managing the phone itself. An Irish player in the WAP arena, Belfast-based APiON, is playing on its strength as a telecoms company, rather than as an Internet company.

APiON, formerly an Aldiscon company before Logica bought Aldiscon, is headed by Mr Denis Murphy, who said the strength of WAP was that it allowed cellular customers to manage more aspects of their accounts, saving operators customer-support calls. Each customer-support call to a cellular operator is estimated to cost £5.

Mr Murphy saw WAP as an improved interface to voicemail, to billing records, and to subscriber management, for example, and predicted that within three to four years the majority of handsets would be WAP-enabled.

However, he said, because the small interfaces made advertising difficult, and because Internet users expected free content, he thought WAP would be more suited to intranets than the Internet.

For example, he said, sales forces would use WAP interfaces to check on reserve stock quantities within their company networks.

He said he saw WAP as a mass-market service, but is up against stiff competition in the shape of Nokia and Ericsson, whom he expects to capture 50 per cent of the world market.

Eoin Licken is at elicken@irish-times.ie