The test: two teenagers can't stop the WAP

For the experienced teen Internet surfer, WAP caused as much excitement as a ripple in a pond. However, for the uninitiated, there is a definite thrill.

Laura, who does not have Internet access at home and who doesn't own a mobile phone, says: "It's easy to use. There's news, sport, entertainment and shopping. If I had one, I'd use the shopping and the sports results."

A keen Manchester United supporter, Laura reckons WAP would allow her to keep up-to-date with match results. She's also into Gaelic and, up until recently, the Olympics.

She has used the Internet a bit - to do school project on the euro and downloaded images of the various coins and notes from an EU site. But, "at the moment the Internet is not important. The other second-years don't use it much either. I've never used e-mail and I don't have a mobile phone."

If cost was no problem, she says she'd buy a WAP.

Then there is Fiona, a habitual Internet surfer and e-mail user. "WAP is frustrating and tedious. When you're looking for something you have to find it on a menu, then you have to go to another menu, and then a third menu, and each time it takes a while to connect.

"There isn't a wide selection of sites and you can't connect to proper websites. It's boring - there isn't much there for teenagers, except shopping. And that's only chocolates and flowers."

But she likes the horoscope, which she finds eventually by going through an entertainment menu to a horoscopes menu, where she chooses between iVenus and Doras. Just as she decides on Doras, she presses the wrong button and has to go through the whole process all over again.

But it turns out to be worth the re-try. "It was surprisingly accurate: `You are suffering from some kind of block today where you are prevented physically from going somewhere . . ."' laughs Fiona, who is limping around with a knee injury.

Somewhat bizarrely, Fiona is also taken with the AA traffic reports, which tell her about roadwork delays between Ashbourne and Dublin and help her plan an imaginary journey to Galway, avoiding any hold-ups.

However, her final verdict is firm: "It's not the real Internet. The Internet has thousands of sites - this has only a few. There's no way of searching for stuff for projects and, if you have an address for a website you want to get to, you can't. You can't buy books or CDs from Amazon.com and there's no graphics, no pictures, no colour, no sound. "As for shopping, imagine buying something from a description over the phone. What could it say? `Red shoulder bag'? You need to look at it. WAP is not very useful or fun."

The Siemens S35 WAP phone was loaned to Media Scope by Eircell.