The hype around wireless is deafening: Consumers, the ads promise, can get stock quotes, weather updates, news and sports scores anytime, anywhere, through their tiny phones. They never need be cut off from e-mail. They can shop from the back seat of a taxi or check their horoscope while waiting at the doctor's office.

By 2003, 61 million Americans will use Internet-enabled mobile devices and will spend $9.3 billion on mobile commerce transactions, according to optimistic projections from International Data Corp. But at least for now, hardly anyone uses this stuff. Only 300,000, or 2%, of the 15 million customers of AT&T Corp's wireless unit are connecting to the company's Web service via their phones, even though AT&T started heavily marketing it back in May. At Sprint Corp's PCS division, which has been touting its wireless Web service for a year, only 720,000, or 90, of its eight million subscribers have even attempted such finger-cramping maneuovres as buying books through Amazon.com, checking stock quotes at Yahoo or sending e-mail with their wireless phones.

Scott Galloway, chief executive of Brand Farm, an Internet incubator, has had a Web-enabled Motorola phone for more than three months. He tried accessing the Web service末once 末 and hasn't gone back. "I'm someone who has trouble setting up their VCR," he says. "This is, in fact, rocket science." There is a litany of reasons why people aren't using the wireless services: The keyboards and screens on phones are tiny and awkward to use (for example, you need to tap the "3" key three times to create the letter "f.") Data-transfer speeds are painfully slow, and each second spent waiting for stuff to download onto the phone costs the customer money as much as 69 cents a minute. Not enough Web sites have reconfigured their services for the few lines of text the phones can display. And there's the all-too-familiar risk of the phone losing the connection, which means a user could get most of the way through an arduous online order and then be dropped.

It is a "brain-dead experience," says J Gerry Purdy, president and chief executive of Mobile Insights Inc., a consulting firm in Mountain View, California. "Consumers would have to really want to use this stuff to put up with the pain of typing anything on these phones."

Some people in the industry set up customers for disappointment by marketing the wireless Web as a mobile version of the fixed-line Internet, says Tom Trinneer, vice president of portal development for AT&T Wireless Services. "It's not about taking the Internet and cramming it into a phone," he says. "This is a whole new medium."

Besides the challenge of winning over consumers, wireless companies also face big technical hurdles. Unlike in Europe, the US wireless networks are based on several, often incompatible, technologies. For callers, that means if you travel outside of your "digital calling area," your Web service is unlikely to work. The hodgepodge of technologies also poses challenges developers trying to invent new devices and services for the untethered Web.

And with security less than perfect on wireless networks, some companies are reluctant to bring big-money transactions to mobile devices.

What's more, wireless carriers will need to buy expensive wireless spectrum 末the legal rights to the airwaves that carry the signals 末 to roll out the industry's next generation of wireless Internet services such as video.

Spectrum auctions in Europe have cost phone carriers billions of dollars. Investors worry that US carriers won't be able to deploy glitzy wireless services fast enough to make good on their own hefty investments, which may mean some of the companies could run out of cash.

This confusion has kept some consumers from buying a Web phone. Ed Dandridge, the chief executive of PSE Networks Inc., a Web site for marketing professionals, is waiting until wireless companies get the kinks out before shelling out cash for a pricey new phone. "A lot of us have been burned before by being early adopters," he says. "Before I move to a Web phone, there's going to need to be a real track record."

The wireless industry now realises this and is busy developing all sorts of new applications to lure the Mr Dandridges of the world to try末and stick with 末 an Internet-enabled phone. The upside for the companies is huge: people spending more money to buy more airtime to use the services. Also, wireless companies hope to get their hands on the fat commissions and ad revenue that big Internet services such as Yahoo! Inc. and America Online Inc. routinely receive from electronic commerce companies wanting to get access to their millions of users.

Many industry watchers say one of the killer applications of the wireless Web on phones will be voice. But they don't mean traditional phone calls. Instead, companies such as Tellme Networks Inc. and HeyAnita Inc. let users dial a toll-free number and retrieve, using their voice, information including traffic reports, movie times and weather. HeyAnita even will read e-mail from a user's Yahoo mailbox. Other companies are developing applications that blend voice and data. Impulsity Inc. of Dallas is developing a travel service that will let users check in for a flight without waiting in line. You sign up for it on your PC and give your cellphone number. About an hour or two before your flight the service will send a text message with a link. When you click on the link your phone will dial into Impulsity's voice service, which will ask you the US Federal Aviation Administration's mandated questions and send a bar code to your phone, which serves as your boarding pass. At the gate, you swipe your phone against abar code reader and board.