Everyone was walking around theUnwired Universe conference today showing off their wireless Net devices. But the buzz wasn't the usual "mine is smaller than yours." Instead, the big boast was "mine is shipping."

Indeed, few technology sectors have coped with more delays, roadblocks, and promises of great things to come - sometime late in the fourth quarter of the next fiscal year - than the handheld Internet market. The scene is a hodgepodge of smartphones, smartpagers, PDAs, desktop companions, tablets and so forth, all communicating through a variety of four-character protocols - CDPD, TDMA, CDMA, GPRS - that mirror the myriad development efforts under way.

"Wireless products are too expensive, air time is too expensive, airlink quality is too poor, coverage isn't broad enough, and advertising and distribution channels are meager," said Mark Steele, director of data products for Qualcomm.

But it's not all bad news: The mobile phone market, now at 250 million units, is expected to blossom to as many as 600 million phones - and all major manufacturers have committed to on-board smart services.

Poised to benefit from all of this is Unwired Planet Inc., host of the conference today and Tuesday in San Francisco. Unwired Planet wants to be the Netscape of handheld devices. Unwired Planet's killer app is theUP.Browser - an ultra-thin, largely text-based client optimized for bit-mapped, 14-line phone displays and other GUI-challenged devices. The UP.Browser is not designed to surf the Web - a strategically smart decision. Rather, it is intended to display and graph data and short utilitarian queries: stocks, Bloomberg, white and yellow pages, phone books - even driving directions.

In April of this year, Unwired Planet submitted its Handheld Device Markup Language and Handheld Device Transport Protocol to the World Wide Web Consortium for standards consideration.

"There will be a microbrowser in every [wireless] phone in the next five years," promised Unwired Planet CEO Alain Rossman. He demonstrated European smartphones such as the French Alcatel, only 12 millimeters thick and boasting a 100-square-pixel display. By comparison, the wildly popular PalmPilot's display is 160 pixels square. In Europe, smartphones are so common that carriers go so far as to target them at high school kids, Rossman said.

The US smartphone market is much smaller, but Unwired Planet recently ported its UP.Browser to 3Com's popular PalmPilot. The first PDA success story will go wireless in Q1 1998 thanks to theMinstrel, a 19.2 Kbps wireless IP modem that clamps to the Pilot's back. There are more than 1 million PalmPilots in use.

It will take numbers on that scale for handheld Net computing to get out of the "coming soon" trap. "The good news," said Unwired Planet's Ben Linder, "Is that we're at the knee of the mass-market curve."

Though Windows CE flashed across the demo screen at Unwired Universe a number of times, it was clear that Microsoft was saving its news of the platform for Comdex.