Downsizing to Wireless

By Michael Elliott

Midnight in London. A long, shivering line of twentysomethings snakes outside a club in the West End. And most of them hold, as if an extension of their right hand, a mobile phone. Some are chatting with pals. Look closely, though, and you will see that many others are text messaging their friends, checking up on who's making out with whom, which clubs are hot tonight; constantly punching the numeric keypad as if to prove that the opposable thumb is what distinguishes humans from lesser primates.

In Europe and Japan, mobile phones have become the indispensable tool of youth. At my niece's London high school, students routinely messaged one another during class. In the U.S., by contrast, the major phone companies haven't targeted kids, and the start-ups that tried to, like Modo, got nowhere. Why not? Chatting is just about the only thing that most of the miserably antiquated U.S. cell phones are good for. In Europe, by contrast, text messaging is almost as significant a use as talk, while in Japan, pink-haired, platform-soled teenagers play cute little games with each other through their cell phones.

Text messaging in Europe costs far less than it does in the U.S. Another reason for the superiority of European and Japanese mobile telephony is better transmission standards. The Europe-wide GSM standard has long allowed a range of uses that are only just becoming widely available in the U.S.; the Japanese firm NTT DoCoMo, with its i-mode technology, has made mobile Internet access available to millions. But there's more to it than that.

Whether a technology catches on with consumers depends on social conditions. For Americans, the gateway (no pun intended) to a connected world is the personal computer. PCs make sense for Americans, with their big houses. It's easy to hide that unlovely box of tricks somewhere out of sight--and use it in peace and quiet. But many Europeans and Japanese live in cramped apartments. For them, a PC not only overwhelms the living room, it also offers no privacy. Mobile phones, by contrast, are unobtrusive, as well as being a liberating way (especially for teenagers) to connect with friends outside the family home. I once asked an industry analyst why two of the world's leading mobile-phone companies, Ericsson and Nokia, were Scandinavian. The answer, my source claimed, was the outdoor life; because Swedes and Finns love dashing off to their huts in the deep woods, far from fixed lines, mobile phones were a godsend. Whole nations of sauna lovers and cross-country skiers became early adopters of a new technology.

All this has relevance to the future of the high-tech industry. It's become conventional wisdom that soon more consumers worldwide will access the Internet by mobile phones than by PCs. Well, maybe. But in the U.S., the world's richest market, some of the most popular applications of Internet technology seem singularly unsuited to a mobile phone, even when the much heralded third-generation phones are in common use. A phone's display is never going to be big enough to handle the rich displays of text and graphics of the American news and financial-services sites. And dare we ask: Who's going to use a phone to download porn?

Though telecom companies in Europe and Asia have paid dearly for 3G licenses, the whole mobile revolution looks further off than once seemed likely. The Financial Times recently reported that only two of the 11 manufacturers with whom NTT DoCoMo had signed contracts for 3G handsets would be ready for a scheduled launch of the service in May. Meanwhile, manufacturers like Ericsson, Motorola and Siemens are scaling back their projections for today's mobile phones, never mind tomorrow's; Ericsson's shares tumbled to a 17-month low after the company said that it expected handset sales to be considerably lower in 2001 than last year. Even Nokia, long the worldwide darling of the sector, is hurting; its stock price is about half its 12-month high.

None of this means that mobile telephony isn't changing the world, or that there are not great companies out there dreaming of applications that will appeal to everyone--even mobile-challenged Americans. Still, the next time you get sold the wonders of the mobile revolution, remember this: outside of a few DJs and the ecstasy dealers, nobody's yet built an industry on the habits of London clubbers.

TIME.com ON AOL See time.com/global for more on wireless devices. E-mail Michael Elliott at melliot@aol.com