Wap phones have gone from media darlings to techno-turkeys in the past few months as the backlash has set in. The system has now become the butt of jokes, like the suggestion that with both Wap phones and rap music, the c is silent.

The hype machine has already moved on to the next generation: to the general packet radio service (GPRS) that is just starting to emerge, and the universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS), for which phone companies are spending billions on licences.

Worse, Wap's struggle to find a market in Europe and the US is being contrasted with the exploding popularity of NTT DoCoMo's more advanced i-mode system in Japan. A VHS v Betamax-style formats war may be brewing. What went wrong?

Karl Hicks, a mobile market analyst with Datamonitor, a UK-based research firm, says many of the problems have not been down to Wap at all, but the devices and networks used. The small screens on mobile phones, the difficulty of entering text, the slow connection speeds and "the inability to get on the network, because of bandwidth restrictions, are not Wap's fault, but people associate them with Wap", he says.

But the truth is that the system was massively oversold. When Wap phones and real Wap services became widely available, the flakiness of the reality made the hype unsustainable. And while it is tempting to blame journalists for hyping a system that not all had used, the trade tends to point the finger at BT.

When BT Cellnet's managing director, Peter Erskine, launched the UK's first mass market Wap service on April 3, he said: "Today's announcement shows that BT Cellnet is determined to put the internet in everybody's pocket at an affordable price. We expect that within 18 months, sales of nearly all new mobile phones will be internet-enabled. It is expected by 2003 that more people could be accessing the web from mobile devices than from PCs. In effect, the mobile phone as we know it has had its day!"

If that wasn't bad enough, Erskine's audience was worse. Some seemed to think he had said that Cellnet was putting the web in everybody's pocket, and that it was the PC that had had its day.

Obviously they were going to be disappointed when what they got was, in effect, a slow dumb terminal with a tiny monochrome screen that sometimes struggled to display a simple menu or a handful of text.

No doubt this is very unfair to Phone.com, the company that invented Wap. Early last year, Macolm Bird, managing director of Phone.com's UK operation, told me: "Wap isn't about phones surfing the web, it's about using services written for phones and sent to phones. It's possible to go to any web site and extract something that you could display on a mobile phone, but you get a much better service if you design the pages with the mobile in mind. So we do encourage people to write their applications in WML - wireless markup language."

In other words, Wap was not designed to put "the internet in your pocket" but to provide something different.

Of course, WML is roughly equivalent to HTML (hypertext markup language), the tagging system used to create web pages. It is also part of a whole raft of incompatible wireless standards that parallel internet standards. Others include WCMP (wireless control message protocol), WTP (wireless transaction protocol), WSP (wireless session protocol), and the scripting language, WMLScript.

Sympathy for Phone.com's point of view is therefore mitigated by the fact that Wap has tried to piggy-back on the success of the internet. With hindsight, it might have been better to present it as a different system.

For comparison, SMS (Short Message Service) has been hugely successful on mobile phones without anyone trying to pretend that "texting" is the same as electronic mail. Both formats are popular precisely because they do something different, and because both have useful applications.

Phil Brown, managing director of Nokia UK, says: "It's unfortunate that Wap has come to dominate the debate, because the consumer offering is not Wap. It's the service the customer is after, not the technology." He thinks that people want services that are personal, relevant and perhaps location specific, which could be anything from the football results to the address of the nearest Chinese restaurant. "If you want to deliver that, then Wap is a very attractive way of doing it."

The problem is that "there's a serious lack of compelling Wap applications out there", according to Tim Sheedy, a senior mobile market analyst with the International Data Corporation. He thinks many of the early adopters bought Wap phones for Tegic's clever T9 text input system, "and because they were just cool phones", but mass market buyers are still waiting for applications.

The web could fill the gap, but web content providers are holding back because it means rewriting their HTML sites in WML. As Hicks says, "It needs a lot more momentum behind Wap before that really starts to happen."

There are several excuses for holding back. For example, Wap might be overtaken by i-mode, which NTT DoCoMo is keen to export, or another system. Even if it is successful, Wap may have a very short life. Some argue that mobile devices are becoming more powerful every year, and that GPRS and UTMS will make it possible to deliver the whole internet to mobiles within two or three years. What's the point of investing in an incompatible cut-down web when you can have the real thing?

I-mode looks good because it uses colour, and its cHTML (Compact HTML) language makes it easier to program, but it could have a tough time in Europe. Sheedy points out that it runs on a packet network, which does not exist in Europe. Also, while i-mode has "thousands and thousands of applications, most of the content is written in Japanese, and most of the developers who understand cHTML are Japanese", he says.

Although Nokia is the only western company to make an i-mode phone, Brown is also dubious about its prospects here. He attributes much of the system's success to text messaging, because the Japanese didn't have SMS when i-mode was launched. Brown also argues that "Wap is an evolving concept" which will soon become more sophisticated. "We're using Wap version 1.1 now but the discussion of Wap 1.2 is already about moving images," he says. "Wap happens to use WML today, but there's nothing to say that can't alter in the future."

But people like Robert Neuschul, technical director of Imagineering Technologies, an internet consultancy based in London, still don't see the point. "We already have technologies in place - SMS, HTML, XML et cetera - so I'm at a loss to understand why we need another specification such as Wap or WML."

And Neuschul already has what the phone companies are promising, although it's more a concept demonstration than a usable product. "I've put a Cabletron RoamAbout wireless card in my Jornada handheld," he says, "so I can talk to my sister in Vancouver while browsing for a vintner who could supply a specific vintage Pouilly-Fumé."

The HP Jornada has a colour screen and provides a usable level of access to the web and to standard internet email services.

It also has a microphone and headphone socket, so it can be used as a phone with free internet-based services such as Go2Call and Net2phone. And you don't ghave to pay international call rates.

Although Hewlett-Packard's Jornadas run Microsoft's Windows CE operating system, anyone with a Palm or Psion can see how a plug-in GSM card could turn them into powerful mobile phones, and even Wap phones using Ezos software.

The phone companies have already recognised the idea's appeal. Three of the biggest - Nokia, Ericsson, and Motorola - are working with Psion in the Symbian consortium to develop "feature phones" based on Psion's EPOC-32 operating system, and some already sell systems that use Microsoft software. Sony's powerful CMD-Z5 mobile phone, for example, uses Pocket Internet Explorer to handle both standard HTML pages and Wap content.

So could telephony become just another aspect of palmtops that, like Microsoft PocketPC systems, already work as MP3 players, email terminals, electronic organisers, games consoles, maps, electronic books?

IDC's Sheedy thinks not. "I think we're going to see a massive fragmentation of devices: maybe someone will want their Walkman to be their mobile phone," he says. "And if you're going out to a night club, do you really want to take your PocketPC?"

Although PDA makers are enjoying a boom in sales, Sheedy reckons their devices will always be bigger and more expensive than mobile phones with small screens and less memory.

"If you ask any handset manufacturer, none of them can say when they will no longer be selling that sort of phone," he says. "There will always be an entry-level handset market."

And if that's the case, maybe there will always be a need for something like Wap.