Hardware aside, based on the conversations I have had with the salesmen from the various mobile-phone companies, it has become obvious that the services available to me as a subscriber will be limited to those services offered by the individual service providers. As such, if I subscribe to a Sunday WAP phone, I will not be able to access information services on offer from Orange, for example.

Doesn't this defeat the purpose of using WAP as a new-age Internet access device? Is this likely to change? NAME AND ADDRESS SUPPLIED First, let me congratulate you on your dogged devotion to new technology.

Unfortunately - and perhaps you know this by now - the value of hi-tech gadgets does not appreciate with age. Any of your PDAs you hand over to a museum would have to be a charitable donation; and don't expect the likes of Sotheby's to organise grand auctions for outdated Palm Pilots.

Mobile-phone companies the world over are not the nicest sort of people to customers, especially when it comes to doing things to ensure customers don't jump ship.

Service providers in Hong Kong are, I must admit, among the worst I've encountered in this department. It's a wonder they allow their customers to actually talk on their phones to customers of rival service providers.

Even before the advent of WAP (wireless application protocol) technology, phone companies had the technology to allow me to send you a short message from my mobile phone, even if we used different carriers. But they don't, and this is a pain for many customers.

With WAP-based services, they appear to be treading the same path. They spend millions of dollars putting in place their own WAP services, complete with content, shopping facilities and other 'stickiness' features and then sign up users whom they charge by the access package and eventually by the minute for usage time.

It makes little sense for, say, Sunday to allow its subscribers to access the services of Orange or any other competitor if it makes money from its content packages. The fact that it makes money by charging for access time appears to make little difference; according to the phone companies, their profit margins on time charges are far too low.

What it seems many of these companies have ignored, but you have not, is that a WAP device is supposed to be as much an Internet access device as a mobile phone. With it, you can access Web pages - though accessing most Web pages on the Net as they are today on a WAP device would take the patience of Job. Content providers need to optimise their Web-based content for wireless access devices much as some have already done for Palm and Windows CE devices.

If Internet content providers can find a good reason to optimise their content for WAP devices and make money by doing so without having to work with individual service providers, they will do so. At the moment, service providers aggregate content and services from a variety of sources into their own WAP 'portals' for their own subscribers.

Not only might they block access to WAP portals of their rivals, they could if they wanted to block access to WAP portals of independent companies.

This strikes me as a huge mistake. The big players in the Web world - from Yahoo! to AOL, and content companies such as our own - will find ways to make money from WAP users. This could be through charging for subscriptions or by coming up with creative advertising formats to fit WAP phone screens. That process has already begun and will accelerate in the coming year even as the number of WAP users increases.

WAP will then come into its own and become what it was always supposed to be - an access platform. Mobile-phone service providers will then become similar to what Internet service providers are today; although they may have their own portals, their primary service will be access provision.

Competition will drive access costs down for customers, and the volume of content available to WAP users will make it impossible for the service companies to block access to those they do not like.

This is similar to how the ISP business developed in Hong Kong in the mid-1990s. Some ISPs would block their customers from accessing the Web pages of rival ISPs. In the end, they lost customers to more open-minded rivals. The same thing will happen in the WAP world in the next one to two years.

In the meantime, however, the bottom line is that the phone companies will try to get away with these irritating practices for as long as they can if it makes financial sense for them to do so. They always have, and I see no reason why this should change.

The only thing that will change this before market forces is regulation, and that is up to the Office of the Telecommunications Authority to work out.

Larry Campbell is publisher of SCMP.com. The opinions expressed in this column are his own.