It's already possible to plug your laptop or PDA into a mobile phone and download your email. It's also possible to buy email-capable mobile phones. Some of these are very limited though as they rely on the GSM phone network which has relatively low data rate of 9.6kbs. Some phones operate using the GPRS network which has a data rate of 38.4Kbs . Satellite phones are available, but are still expensive, and have similar bandwidth limitations.

Some sites on the web have been adapted for mobile use, in the form of WAP (Wireless Application Protocol). This uses an HTML-like language called WML (Wireless Markup Language) to provide pages of information in a compiled, compressed form, designed to download quickly over the limited bandwidth of mobiles. Its main drawback has been the limited availability of WML-encoded material, despite the possibilities of automatic conversion possible usig XML-based tools.

Since the introduction of next generation of phones called 3G, with a date rate of up to 3.6Mbps , WML has become completely obsolete as the bandwidth required for true web access is now available.