The phone manufacturers have a tough time innovating, at least in the U.S. In contrast to Europeans, who enjoy a wonderful, seamless cellular-phone system, based on a continent-wide technical standard, Americans suffer with a disastrously designed system. There are several competing, incompatible standards, a situation that inhibits innovation in phones and places too much power in the hands of bureaucratic carriers.

Still, a number of very interesting new phones are making their debut this year. The most daring, Qualcomm's pdQ phone, has a PalmPilot digital organizer built right in. It'll be rolled out nationally in the fall, and I'll review it then. But I've been trying out three other wireless phones with interesting designs and features. One taps the Internetand has its own built-in organizer functions. A second can function, without alteration or hassle, both in the U.S. and Europe. A third uses a novel battery design to stay thin and light.

NEOPOINT 1000: This silver-colored $399 phone, sold by Sprint PCS, manages to squeeze an extraordinarily large 11-line screen into a phone that's still about average size. It comes from NeoPoint Inc., a new San Diego company, which makes the phones in Korea.

This kind of phone can receive e-mail or other text messages, but its screen is typically too small to make these features useful. The NeoPoint is the first I've seen with a screen that makes this practical.

I found its calendar and address book, which can hold as many as 1,000 entries, to be rudimentary but usable. In general, the phone's user interface, built around an oval-shaped navigation button and graphical icons, is very well done and a real cut above anything I've seen on a phone before. It can even accept spoken commands.

In addition, theNeoPoint 1000 comes with the needed software and cable to synchronize its calendar and address-book data with a PC, using either one of several popular PC programs or its own limited PC address-book and calendar software. I tested this feature, and it worked quite well.

The phone can also retrieve short bursts of data -- news, stock quotes, weather and so forth -- from the Internet. This function worked OK, though I found setup and navigation to be a tad difficult compared with the rest of the phone's functions. You can also go to Web sites, but these sites were never meant to be seen on a small screen and so are basically unusable on these phones.

The e-mail function is so-so. It requires a new e-mail address, different from your usual one. Entering text with the limited phone keypad is made easier because the NeoPoint uses Tegic's clever T9 technology, which tries to guess the word you're typing. But it's still a tedious process compared with using a keyboard.

Overall, this is a very nice phone, buteven with the big screen, I can't imagine using it instead of my PalmPilot and laptop as my principal organizer or e-mail machine. It just can't compare with these devices for screen display or features. I can, however, see people uploading to the phone all their contacts and using that list to make dialing much easier.

ERICSSON WORLD PHONE: Because the U.S. and Europe have different cellular-phone technologies, it's almost impossible to take your American cell phone to Europe and use it there. But on a trip to Greece and Turkey this summer, I took along a $299 Ericsson I888 World Phone. It worked in Washington and New York in June, and in July it worked perfectly in Istanbul and Athens.

The phone is based on the GSM technical standard, which is in use all over Europe and in parts of the U.S., including New York City, where the cell-phone carrier Omnipoint sells this phone. The U.S. version of GSM differs from the European one, but this metallic-blue phone includes both flavors, so it works on bothsides of the Atlantic, as long as you buy an international roaming plan from a carrier like Omnipoint.

The phone even comes with chargers for various European electrical systems, and it has an infrared port that can be used, with the right software, to create a slow wireless connection for a laptop modem.

QUALCOMM THIN PHONE: The Qualcomm 860, which sells for between $99 and $250, depending on your carrier and plan, has very few bells and whistles. It doesn't store 1,000 addresses or work in Turkey. But it uses an unusual internal battery, rather than relying solely on the typical clip-on power cells. As a result, it's just two-thirds of an inch thick, and weighs only about 4 ounces.

This slender phone provides a respectable 2.5 hours of talk time and three to four days of standby time. You can extend these times with external batteries that swell the phone's weight and size, but I've found in my tests that I can get a full day of use, with very good reception, on just the internalbattery.

It's great that cell-phone makers are finally cranking out some really innovative models. Too bad the cell-phone carriers in the U.S. can't seem to provide really seamless national service.

(www.ptech.wsj.com)