Mobile dream realised and turning sour

Douglas Adams, author of the bestselling Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy, may not seem the most obvious champion of internet-enabled mobile phones but he is billed in precisely this way in the latest issue of Time magazine.

A profile of the author's new internet venture, an online guide called h2g2, recalls that in his original book published in 1978 researchers and travellers roam the galaxy armed with mobile electronic devices, beaming in reviews which are instantly available for anybody to read.

What was merely a narrative mechanism for Adams has turned into reality thanks to internet-enabled mobile phones.

Not that Adams sees himself as a prophet. "I didn't foresee the internet," he says. "But then neither did the computer industry. Not that that tells us very much, of course. The computer industry didn't even foresee that the century was going to end."

Joking aside, there is a danger that the dream of the much-hyped Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) is already turning sour. A flurry of negative announcements recently has suggested that consumers may be more reticent about adopting mobile internet technology than initial bullish projections suggested. Nokia, the Finnish mobile phone maker, has shocked the markets with its warning that handset sales will not be as strong as expected in its third quarter.

UBS Warburg is cutting its share-price target for ARM Holdings, the chip designer, citing disappointing debuts for the next generation of mobile phones. This has prompted an extraordinary response from ARM's chief financial officer, Jonathan Brooks: "We never thought these things were going to roll out quickly anyway. I personally never thought WAP was going to be a big thing."

The mobile operating companies admit to being disappointed with their WAP connections. In Britain, Orange claims it has about 80,000 WAP-enabled phones in use, while BT Cellnet says it has 175,000, although many have been given away.

In Germany, the auction of the third-generation mobile phone licences is proving a much more cautious affair than was the case in Britain, with total bids reaching $4.87 billion. It is also understood that the average usage per active WAP-user on Vodafone's German subsidiary, D2, is less than a minute a day, barely enough to dial up and then give up.

- INDEPENDENT