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SAN FRANCISCO -- Is there a future for cell phones that can display Web data on their tiny screens? Supporters of a budding wireless data protocol think so.
"It's about surgical information access," said Ben Linder of the Wireless Access Protocol Forum. "You know what you want and you get it. It's not about surfing for fun. It's about knowing what you need and getting to it fast from wherever you are."
The WAP Forum is an industry consortium working to establish a wireless Web protocol as an industry standard. Linder, a member of the group's marketing committee, is vice president of Phone.com, which has built a WAP-based browser.
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The 120 members of the WAP Forum, which convened its latest bimonthly meeting this week, include all the major cell-phone manufacturers and wireless carriers. Most wireless manufacturers plan to introduce WAP-compatible phones -- or "pre-WAP" devices -- to the market by year's end.
"A year from now, tens of millions of handsets with browsers in them will have shipped -- hundreds of millions in two years," enthused outgoing WAP Forum Chairman Chuck Parrish at a luncheon meeting with reporters and industry analysts Wednesday.
Parrish outlined what he saw as signs of increasing momentum for the protocol: The number of WAP Forum member companies has grown from 40 to 120 since WAP's introduction a year ago; manufacturers joining the forum represent 95 percent of all the handsets in the world market; and member cellular carriers represent one-third to one-half of the world market.
Parrish also announced the release of the first commercial-ready version of the protocol. Handset manufacturers from Panasonic to Nokia to Ericsson said they are moving ahead with product plans using WAP 1.1.
Some companies demonstrating WAP devices at the meeting said WAP 1.0 -- which the WAP Forum described as a "public beta" -- was the main reason why few phones have materialized.
Finnish telecom equipment maker Nokia, a founding member of the forum, in February was the first to introduce a WAP-enabled device to the European market. It plans to roll out a version for the United States next year.
