At least in some eyes, all that the punch-drunk telco industry needs in order to recover is a set of exciting new services--Web services, to be exact. Wireless phone carriers are working up enthusiasm for proposed wireless data services such as text messaging, E-mail, and video games due this year. Most of those services are being written in Java, with Microsoft's .Net a second choice for developers. .Net-enabled phones with a similar array of services are expected to be available before year's end.

"The industry is trying to move the desktop metaphor to mobile devices," says Craig Peddie, a messaging-technology executive with Motorola Inc. At the JavaOne developers conference in San Francisco last week, Motorola unveiled a download server that phone companies can use to support games, instant messaging, shared calendars, and other services. MmO2, formerly BT Cellnet, is the first to test the server, called Mobile Services Café, which is based on Java 2 Micro Edition. Motorola says it has shipped 4.5 million Java-enabled phones in the past year and plans to ship 6 million this year. Nokia, which sells eight J2ME phones, says it will sell "tens of millions" of the handsets this year.

That's but a fraction of the cell-phone market, of course--and that, in part, explains why telcos are pushing games and other consumer-oriented services--they think a bloom of consumer use will lead to more business use of Java-based apps. "All the play among telcos is about games," says Paul Reddick, a VP of business development at Sprint's PCS division, which this summer will roll out the first nationwide third-generation wireless network. 3G networks shoot data at an average of four times the speed of existing wireless networks, permitting telcos to transmit digital images and video clips. Sprint said last week that it would sell developers an integrated development environment for creating content for its 3G Java-enabled handsets.

More straight-business uses of Java-enabled wireless devices would follow the anticipated consumer boom. Motorola and Research in Motion Ltd., whose new BlackBerry handheld includes a cell phone, last week demonstrated an application that can access back-office systems using Java-enabled phones so salespeople, for example, can verify order status.

"When I talk to CIOs, they say the BlackBerry is no longer a communication device, it's a corporate computing asset," says Research in Motion VP David Yach. "It's a big shift for them." Some 13,000 companies use the BlackBerry for everything from recording gas meter readings to tracking client time for lawyers.

Southern Linc, an Atlanta telco subsidiary of Southern Co. that serves 250,000 business and government customers in the Southeast, signed an agreement last week with Tira Wireless to offer its subscribers J2ME-based apps. According to Julie Pigott, Southern Linc's VP of marketing, the company is still considering what apps to offer.