The number of Internet-connected cellphones represents a small portion of the total number of cell phones, said Dylan Brooks, an analyst at New York-based Jupiter.
"People using them are even lower," he said. There will be 5.3 million people accessing the Internet through wireless devices at least once a month in 2001, Brooks estimated. About 120 million people in the US use cellphones, according to the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association.
Consumers don't want to read e-mail on tiny phone screens and pay extra to get Internet access through the devices, researchers and analysts said. Downloading news or e-mail on the devices can be slow compared to PCs, and writing messages on tiny keypads can be frustrating, they said.
Getting the Web over mobile phones "was a dud," said Dan Steinbock, researcher with Columbia University's Institute for Tele-Information.
America Online wants customers, who are online an average of 70 minutes a day, to stay connected the other 23 hours, said America Online's Ashkin.
For that to happen, most homes need high-speed Internet access because such connections are always online. Slower lines used by most US households require users to access the Internet every time their computer is turned on.
At the end of 2001, 8.6 million US homes will have high-speed access in their homes, or 14 percent of all households with Internet access, according to Jupiter.
That will grow, although slower Internet access will remain the predominant method of getting online for at least the next four years, Jupiter says. For example, in 2005, 51.4 million people will log on through slow online connections, compared with 28.8 million through fast access.
America Online's e-mail pager and a scaled-down PC made by Gateway Inc that costs about US$500 are examples of how America Online is charging too much for the Internet devices, analysts said.
"Consumers don't want to pay more than US$200 for hardware that lets them send e-mail on the fly," said Jordan Rohan, an analyst at Wit SoundView, who has a "strong buy" rating on shares of AOL Time Warner.
Prices for Internet-connected devices will come down over time, said America Online's Schuler.
Internet-connected pagers and mobile phones are geared to business use, said Faith Popcorn, chief executive of BrainReserve, a provider of information on consumer behavior and trends to large companies.
Web-connected devices will catch on in about three years after companies redesign devices to mesh personal uses with business, Popcorn predicted.
"When people understand how they can be using them more for family life," such as keeping children's schedules, the devices will become more popular, she said.
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