For most of us with mobile phones growing out of our ears it is all about talk. The phone is just that, a phone, and the display panel is there to make it easier to use.

But that is about to change. Fuelled by competition for customers, operators are increasingly turning to value-added services based on short messages to transform phones from mere voice boxes to mobile data terminals. The key to all this is the short messaging service (SMS) available on most digital mobile phones (Eircell, Esat, and soon Meteor GSM services in the State). On a mundane level, the SMS service allows messages of up to 160 characters to be sent to phones, costing the sender about 15p. Ranging from sending simple discreet messages to people who do not want to be interrupted to local information services targeted at users in specific areas, a whole host of new applications is about to arrive.

The acknowledged world leader in supplying the software which provides SMS services on mobile networks is Aldiscon, an Irish company. Bought by British software giant Logica last year, Aldiscon supplies its SMS systems to just over half the world's mobile operators, and its technical director, Mr Joe Cunningham, rattles off new applications and services with an evangelistic enthusiasm which makes racing commentators sound staid.

The most simple applications, says Mr Cunningham, are personal messages sent to mobile users. These can be sent from other phones, or, if the operator supports it, from websites. While such websites are usually run by operators for their own customers, one South African operator's website (www.mtn.co.za) allows SMS messages to be freely sent to most of the world's operators, including Eircell. Mr Cunningham says MTN, owned by Cable and Wireless, offers the free service because it boosts its profile in an extremely competitive South African mobile market.

But the busiest market using Aldiscon's equipment is Japan, where Tokyo Digital processes two million short messages a day. Much of the reason for this, according to Mr Cunningham, is the advanced level of services and phone display panels there. And it is not all business: there is also a midnight peak hour, he says, as hundreds of thousands of Japanese teenage girls exchange bedtime messages with their school friends.

Apart from personal messages, many cellular operators are using SMS to provide value-added services. The British operator Cellnet, for example, provides a free, Web-based service called Genie (www.genie.cellnet.co.uk) which allows users to receive customised messages. The main categories are sport (football and Formula One racing results), money (share portfolio updates), travel (train timetables) and job vacancies. There are also news feeds and users can be alerted to messages in email accounts too.

The possibilities for Genie are nearly endless. During last summer's World Cup, for example, Cellnet was sending tens of thousands of messages with match results to subscribers who couldn't spend the day glued to television or websites.

Although Eircell also used SMS to send World Cup results, Irish mobile subscribers have yet to see significant additional services. "Neither Esat [Digifone] nor Eircell has launched very exciting applications," says Mr Cunningham, but he predicts they are not far away (and as Aldiscon supplies both operators, he should know). The operators have so far been more concerned with network rollout and pricing, he says, adding: "Now they're beginning to move into value-added services." Irish customers can expect these services over the next six to nine months.

One SMS service is already provided by Digifone using software from another Irish firm, Conduit - one of Aldiscon's competitors. Unanswered calls can be redirected to a virtual secretary, an operator who takes a short message and sends it to the mobile using SMS.

Further SMS services both here and abroad will likely include sending email directly to phones, although operators are understandably wary of customers being bombarded with unsolicited commercial messages, the mobile equivalent of spam mail.

More useful again perhaps is a service called Universal Access Message Service (UAMS). This allows a user to enter all email and voicemail accounts on a website, and the server then sends all message headers (sender and subject information), as well as notification of voicemail, to the user's phone. So far, says Mr Cunningham, a "couple of hundred thousand customers" in the US are using UAMS to tie together their various information services.

But most exciting of all, according to many observers, is a technology called cell broadcast. Using this, operators continually broadcast localised information in SMS messages. Users with appropriate phones can then browse for services available locally. The phone needs an appropriate display and software.

Mr Cunningham cites the example of someone looking for flowers in Blanchardstown Shopping Centre being informed of florists nearby. If the same user drove to Dundrum and again looked up florists, the service would then indicate local florists there.

Describing this as a "very effective advertising medium", Mr Cunningham predicts this will ultimately become a mobile version of the Yellow Pages directory. Business users are already using this service in Britain to find taxi services near airports, he says, while in the US the service is being used to issue local tornado warnings.

So what's keeping us? The barriers to SMS catching on here are the lack of applications provided by Irish mobile operators and the lack of suitably advanced phone display panels. But the former is being addressed, so anyone intending to ride the mobile data wave should choose new phones carefully.

Eoin Licken is at elicken@irish- times.ie