Gone are the days when you need to sit down at a desktop PC or possess an expensive laptop to access the Internet. Just buy a WAP phone and you're connected. The wired Internet has gone wireless.
Or so the marketing hype for WAP (wireless access protocol) phones would have us believe. In fact, what's happening is that a portion of the Internet is being translated into WAP-language and presented on a mobile phone handset. And then there's also e-mail or wapmail.
Inevitably, it's the more commercial sites that are available: WAP shopping, WAP commerce, WAP banking, WAP news, WAP listings and TV guide, sports and weather . . . And there aren't even enough of those yet.
The small size of the viewing window, a slow connect time and the difficulties of using a tiny keyboard all make WAP'ing a cramped and somewhat frustrating experience. However, the technology is only in its infancy, having been launched on the market last November.
When it comes to market penetration, mobile phones are where it's at. Almost half of the Republic's population owns a mobile phone: the number of mobiles has now surpassed the number of fixed-line telephones. Eircell has a customer base of more than one million, while Esat has about 800,000 mobile customers.
However, WAP phones sales only account for a tiny proportion of these: ESAT's sales of WAPs are in the region of 20,000 to 30,000 and Eircell's closer to 60,000. Campbell Scott, product development manager with Esat, says WAP sales are really only beginning, with a delay in handset availability and only a trickle available before last Christmas. There were also software faults with the first WAP phone.
The faults have since been fixed and a variety of cheaper handsets are now available from a number of different manufacturers.
With prices now significantly lower, Scott says the growth in sales in the past two months is significant, with numbers tripling. The odds are if you buy a new phone it will support WAP, he adds. A spokeswoman for Eircell echoes this optimism, saying this year's Christmas market will be very important for WAP.
And the number and variety of services will increase. Esat recently signed a deal with Ticketmaster, so you can buy concert tickets, while Eircell has an agreement with Ryanair, so you can book flights. As for security, Scott explains that you set up payment details and a delivery address and don't send your credit card number over the phone.
The problem WAP now faces is how to convince users that it will shape up. The initial promises were probably excessive; users soon discovered that WAP failed to deliver "real Internet", and that shook the public's confidence. In Britain, where more than 30 million people own a mobile phone, only 200,000 WAP phones have been sold to date. And WAP-commerce is off to a very slow start. A recent survey by British management consultant AT Kerny found that fewer than 1 per cent of WAP users worldwide had ever used their mobile to make a purchase.
There are alternatives to WAP for putting a version of the Internet into a mobile. A competing technology called iMode is doing very well in Japan, with some eight million subscribers and 7,000 special web pages, offering a variety of content to customers. With iMode, you're permanently connected to the Internet, so there is no need to dial up and wait for a connection. But this may not be the main factor in its success.
Amusement and entertainment account for 40 per cent of iMode traffic; its success may have something to do with the Japanese culture, where cool gadgets attract a cult following. Remember the Tamogotchi? Also very few Japanese people have Internet PCs at home, so iMode may be their only experience of the Internet. In Europe and the US, most people are already familiar with the wired Internet and have quite high expectations as to what it can bring them.
The Japanese provider of iMode, DoCoMo, is planning to bring the technology to Europe. There may be competition - or convergence - between WAP and iMode.
The next step in mobile communications is GPRS (General Packet Radio Service). which Eircell launched earlier this month. GPRS is permanently connected and you're charged for downloading content rather than for the time you spend online. Stephen Brewer, the chief executive of Eircell, says he does not expect the teething problems experienced with the introduction of WAP phones.
But, GPRS is not the end of the story. It is being billed as the second-and-a-half generation ("2.5G" in the jargon) with third generation mobile phones (3G) still two or three years away. It is this final 3G standard that should make mobile Internet access and product shipping a reality. With 3G, people should be able to access all kinds of digital information - music, photos, video, television - while on the move. To quote Nokia: "3G is the business opportunity of the 21st century."
The wireless industry is predicting that more people will be accessing the Internet from their mobile phones than from their PCs over the next few years. But they would say that, wouldn't they?
And it is further predicted that within five years, handsets will have the computing power of a laptop and, yes, these devices will be used for nearly all our communication and information needs in the future.
Pushing the dream even further, if digital guru Nicholas Negromonte's vision comes to fruition, we might use the heel of our shoe or a keyboard stitched in silver thread on our Levi's jacket to interface with the Internet.
Meanwhile, even though many regard WAP as just a stopgap, the Oxford English Dictionary has given it a vote of confidence: in the latest edition, WAP is one of 67 new words to join the English language.
