Back then, new brands seemed to surface daily, operating systems were multiplying, and the idea of standards was but a futuristic dream. Today's phone market is, if anything, even more of a free-for-all. I see handsets springing up like spring flowers, all laden with features such as built-in cameras, global positioning systems, bright touch screens, slide-out keypads and inside, operating systems galore.

How to extract the big picture from all this? My suggestion is to follow two major themes.

The first is the relationship between your phone and the Internet. This might seem like a no-brainer, but watching how mobile operators have played the Internet connection shows that the dust is still settling. The cell phone companies have acknowledged the power of the Internet largely by hoping to rope off particular areas of content and control access to them.

You can understand their thinking. Keeping control of the Internet experience means that the cell companies can make a premium off content delivery. The coming world of 3G services can be parlayed to offer mobile TV and no end of downloadable music as the mobile operators cut their own deals with content providers.

The idea reflects a crucial misunderstanding of the nature of content versus communications, an irony indeed in that it springs from companies whose business is that very communication.

For while wireless downloading may have its advocates -- I'm sure there are people watching television somewhere on their telephones -- the real action is in connecting to other people. Voice is part of that, of course, but so are text messaging, e-mail, photos and video, all embedded in the broader category we have come to call social networking.

This is a market that wants to see YouTube on mobile phones a lot more than CNN. Packaging content will fail when compared with the real prize, unfettered network access.

This is a lesson Apple's iPhone has begun to drive home. Use one for a while, and you realize that despite their limitations, the phones we carry really can connect to the Internet with a clean, intuitive interface. That awakens the desire for an open path to the Net.

Verizon surely sees this trend, having announced its intention to let any compatible phone operate over its network, while letting users run programs of their choice by year's end.

The computer in your pocket

As phones begin to open to the broader Internet, watch services that take advantage of computers in the pocket multiply.

Case in point: Yahoo, which at the recent Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association trade show in Las Vegas introduced the new version of its mobile search. OneSearch 2.0 does several things right in the mobile context. First, it allows retrieved Web sites to be annotated with answers to queries that go beyond Web links. Search for a local restaurant and get not just its Web site but reviews, photos and options to send the link to others.

This is smart business, melding information with communication, and it will tap numerous publishers to sharpen search results.

Yahoo's other smart move is picking up voice activation technology from Vlingo, a company in which Yahoo has invested. Voice is a crucial search option for phones, one spreading to handset manufacturers. Once implemented, OneSearch will include predictive typing technology -- a capability the iPhone has shown off to such good effect -- for those who want to type a query.

The other theme to watch is your phone's ability to connect to the computer on your desktop. Mucking around with your contacts while you thumb-type on a tiny keyboard, trying to remember which input pops up what menu, can be excruciating.

Dashwire of Seattle (www.dashwire.com) is offering a workable alternative, a free service that manages your phone online. This is a company and a category to watch.

The beauty of the concept is that Dashwire will upload the content on your phone and store it on its own servers. From that point on, what you do on the Web will be reflected on your telephone and vice versa. Tasks such as contact management or text messaging become more or less trivial, while moving your personal content -- such as the pictures you snap with the phone's camera -- into a Web-based album is a breeze.

Dashwire offers a useful history of your calls, messaging and other activity, and perhaps most significant, it is working with CallWave to offer transcription of voice messages into text.

Seeing the content on your phone, from photos to bookmarks, laid out on a spacious console and being able to push content to friends easily is a novel experience for cell users. The software is in its beta testing period, with significant upgrades on the horizon.

The people who somehow made sense of the cacophony of the early PC revolution defined where computing was going.

The powerful user interface of the iPhone and the trend toward opening phones up to the broader Internet will work together to drive next-generation products in the mobile phone industry. User management tools are a key factor in this, which is why services such as Dashwire should multiply, creating an opening for innovation that is miles wide.

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