Unless UMTS standard 3GPP Release 9 is your idea of bedtime reading, the chief interest in the Manx Telecom trial lies in the applications - services, that is - being tested. The idea is to find out what people will pay good money for: Europe's operators would give their birthright for the answer.

Brian Jackson, head of Now International, the company that provides the gateway (computer system) which takes content from individual sites and feeds it out to the 3G network via its portal, says he sifted through some 230 potential content providers to select the 28 or so now running on the service. "We wanted to provide a taste of the 3G experience. When people on the mainland see the speed of these services, there's going to be a new mobile revolution." He adds: "It may be more significant for personal digital assistants than for handsets, though."

The portal hosts six categories of content: games, living, local, mobile, news and sport. The Paradyme Group provides A Dark Future in the games category, for example, while Bizzgo fields the constituent parts of a virtual mobile office - diary, location maps and so on. If shopping and fashion are your thing, call up handbag.com. UK Compass will guide you to your nearest local services.

It has to be said that, at this early stage, many of the services are incomplete and some might seem inappropriate to the trial site. In a community where unemployment is less than 1 per cent, for example, a phone-based employment agency might seem redundant.

Phone-a-job, the creation of LESoftware, has had some success on the mainland, where it allows potential employees to receive notification of vacancies over the phone and enables them to send CVs to prospective employees from the provider's website. The intention is that the 3G version would let employers and candidates carry out initial interviews by videotelephony: candidates would be able to investigate house prices, local schools and so on before making a decision.

Visitors to the island, however, might welcome Isle of Man On Air, a location service developed by Siemens' Roke Manor research centre. Siemens worked with Manx Telecom, mmO2 and NEC on the trial. Consumers log on to the service using a laptop computer connected to a handset. It provides location maps, historical and tourist information.

To those familiar with slow, cumbersome WAP, the difference is immediately apparent. Connection is virtually instantaneous. Colour screens add a new dimension to graphical and pictorial information. But the biggest lesson from the Manx trial may be what many have suspected for some time: that full-blooded 3G services will fall to large-screened PDAs and the like: services to mobile phones will inevitably have to be less sophisticated.

alan.cane@ft.com

www.manx-telecom.com

www.wwp3gx.com