The launch of iPhone this week has created excitement about the future of the mobile phone, writes Richard Waters

Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google, has taken to reciting the latest mantra of Silicon Valley. Asked recently what the next big opportunities would be for the search company, he said: "Mobile, mobile, mobile."

This echoes the hopes of media companies worldwide, which are coming to see mobile handsets as vehicles for their own ambitions to grab the attention of more people, in more places for more time.

This week's launch of Apple's iPhone has become a lightning rod for this latest burst of interest in mobile media consumption and internet access. Even if it remains a niche product sold in only small quantities, such is the power of Apple's brand and presumed prowess in consumer technology that some see the iPhone as a catalyst for an entire industry.

"I am 100 per cent convinced it will be the change agent for the mobile internet," says Marco Boerries, the executive in charge of Yahoo's efforts to go mobile. Just as the Macintosh computer brought personal computing to the masses, so the iPhone will trigger a breakthrough in mobile computing, he adds.

The early history of the mobile internet, however, suggests that it would pay to be cautious. "The whole [ mobile] industry in the last eight years has spent hundreds of billions of dollars to buy bandwidth, upgrade networks and subsidise handsets," says Mr Boerries. "And what do people do? The same things they did eight years ago."

Ringtones provided a brief, but not lasting, flurry. Mobile games bring in €1.6 billion but that market is slowing and will reach only €2 billion globally by 2011, according to Screen Digest, a research firm. Consumers never took to e-mailing pictures from their cameraphones, something that mobile operators hoped would generate strong demand for mobile data services.

Other new services may face a similar fate. Downloading music direct to mobile handsets is likely to become only a €1.5 billion market by 2011, predicts Screen Digest, as consumers take the cheaper route of "side-loading" songs onto mobiles from PCs.

Aside from SMS messaging (or texting), this has left an anaemic mobile data industry. In Europe, most carriers earn just €0.74-€1.48 a month from each subscriber from these data services, according to Analysys Research (they earn another €2.25-€9 from texting).

To some extent, the fortunes of the mobile industry are likely to continue to rest heavily on communication services. Just as texting has been the bright spot in recent years, mobile e-mail looks set to become a big new market. Beyond this, hopes rest broadly on two things.

One is that browsing from small handsets will finally become a worthwhile experience. The other is that the handset is about to become a form of portable television. Mobile television emerged in South Korea, but in recent months the first services in Europe to broadcast to handsets have attracted considerable interest. It is too early, though, to say whether such services will become big money-earners.

Current hopes rest heavily on the emergence of a mobile advertising business. Just as the internet moved from being a subscription-based business to one relying largely on advertising, some now expect the same to happen in the mobile world.

With the mobile advertising market worth less than €0.75 billion last year, it may seem a stretch to think that this can become the foundation for a thriving industry. Yet the same might have been said of internet advertising in the mid-1990s.