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For the last couple of days I've been playing with my latest tech toy, the Nokia "please don't call it a phone" N800.

This and similar devices, including the iPhone, have world-changing implications for newsgathering as well as publishing and distribution.

I'll get to those points shortly, but first a few words about why I went with the N800.

I conquered my iPhone lust rather quickly by thinking about the true cost, which (including the mandatory contract) some have estimated at well over $2,000 with opportunity costs as high as $17,670. Coincidentally, that high figure is about a dollar per word in the restrictive contract.

So, for $357.98 on Amazon.com I bought the N800, which is not a phone. It's an Internet tablet. Like the iPhone, it uses Wi-fi connections if they're available. Unlike the iPhone, it doesn't use the phone network ... unless you have a Bluetooth-capable cellphone in your pocket. That's my next step, which I'll take when I get around to it. My current phone, which runs Microsoft's hellish mobile phone software, doesn't do Bluetooth.

The N800 does let me make worldwide phone calls via Skype, which isn't available for the iPhone. And it includes a Web browser with both Opera and Mozilla engines, full Ajax, and Flash 9. It has instant messaging on pretty much every existing service, email, games and several media players. I can listen to the BBC streaming through the net, or local radio stations via FM. I can watch YouTube.

It lacks Apple's single-minded focus on simplicity. What you get in trade is flexibility and openness -- under the hood, it's running Debian Linux. And unlike the iPhone, Nokia lets you open the hood and tinker as much as you want.

For the mobile journalist, this could be the office in a pocket. Forget the backpack. Paired with an $80 folding Bluetooth keyboard, you have a pretty decent ultralight writing workstation. Add a camera that stores images or videos on an SD card and you can file (or blog) from Taco Bell. (The SD card is necessary because the N800 doesn't have a host-mode USB connector, but it does have a card reader.)

For everyone else, this is the world in your pocket. It's the real Internet, not the fake Internet the telcos have been peddling. The zoomable, 800-pixel browser means you can know everything that can be discovered through Google and Wikipedia. Every news site, every blog, every MP3 stream, every podcast.

But isn't the Wi-fi limitation a problem? Less than you might think. Where I work in Augusta, Ga., there is free Wi-fi all over downtown: city-supplied service on the Augusta Common, open service at most of the bars and restaurants. Fast-food joints, libraries and most hotels provide free service. I can read BBC News while waiting in the car line at Wendy's. Sprint is supposedly preparing a version of the N800 that will use Wi-max, a wide-area broadband technology that can blanket entire cities just like cellphones can.

So, why would you pick up a copy of the local newspaper to read over lunch if you have all of this at your fingertips?

Websites no longer have to offer horrid phone-tech services in order to reach mobile users. Pretty much everything currently deployed will work just fine.

But there is a challenge easily overlooked: Create new kinds of content and services tailored to mobile needs. That's where the opportunities are waiting, and if our track record holds up, it's where local newspapers will drop the ball. We now have the whole world at our fingertips, but it doesn't have to be the old world.

WSJ reports that Google's long-rumored mobile phone is on its way to becoming a reality.

Drawing from no actual evidence whatsoever, mixed with a big helping of baseless speculation, here's what I think we'll get:

• Cute seasonal logos in Fisher-Price primary colors.
• Be careful what you say, because it's all recorded. Forever.
• If you're near a Wifi connection, you use that instead of the telco's system.
• Be careful what you say, because it'll be used to target advertising your way. (Remember "My Tivo Thinks I'm Gay.")
• The ads will be relevant and you'll click on them. Since you'll probably be driving, eating and talking at the same time, carnage will ensue.
• "I'm feeling lucky" gets a whole new meaning.
• Be careful where you go, because the built-in GPS will be used to target ads at you, and ... your waypoints will be stored forever. We'll take a giant leap toward MOM.
• If you can connect via Google Talk and bypass the phone network end-to-end, you will. Just don't use it for emergencies.
• As Google works to build out its free Wifi business, the telcos will collapse. No one mourns their passing.
• You can't have one unless somebody sends you an invite.
• The camera will post directly into Picasa Web and YouTube. We'll take a giant leap toward David Brin's future where we all watch each other and spool the video directly to the net.
• Total integration with Google Earth.
• EPIC2014.

(Feel free to post your own baseless speculation!)

Jay Small cites an eMarketer item about the low level of Internet access by U.S. mobile phone users.

The article cites a number of reasons for the low usage despite pretty much universal access capability in the installed handset base. (The study says 81% of mobile browsers support XHTML Mobile Profile, the latest standard.)

I think it's much simpler than it's all made out to be: The telcos have simply strangled this new medium.

First of all, the pricing plans are just plain nuts. If you're introducing something new, you need to encourage sampling. But the typical U.S. cellphone provider penalizes the casual experimenter with outrageous fees while offering fairly reasonable pricing to heavy (and even abusive) users. Result: New users are scared away.

Second is the "walled garden" mentality that continues to dominate the scene. Fire up the web browser and where do you go? The telco's own little collection of pages where you can pay to download games and ringtones. The offer is fine, but consumers need a clear path to the richness of the mobile Internet.

There really is a rich mobile Internet developing. It's just hard to find. Google and Yahoo are making some progress on organizing it, but typically the user has to triple-tap his or her way out of the walled garden in order to get to those resources.

As the telcos slowly get over their failed attempts to own/control it all and clean up their pricing mess -- and I think they will -- I believe we're going to see a rapid upswing in mobile Internet usage.

To be part of this growing mobile Internet, we need to not only build pages that are optimized for little screens, but more importantly build services that are optimized for mobile users.

What do I most need to know, or do, while out wandering with my phone in my pocket?

Local directory services would be at high on the list. Restaurants. Movies. Specific categories of classified advertising -- apartments for rent, yard sales, et cetera. Traffic reports if you can get them. Local media ought to be all over this.

The last thing we need to do is jam AP wire stories into the mix. They're already available through a shorter path -- built into the telco's private garden.

Yet I continue to see local newspapers trying to build tiny-format "online newspapers" with the tired old newspaper content mix. I'll confess that I have been on occasion so bored in an airport waiting area that I've browsed through wire stories on my phone, but never on a local newspaper site. There are many, much better sources for world news.

Building these services actually is quite easy. If you have RSS feeds already set up, an afternoon of coding with PHP will create a fairly useful mobile app.

A couple of months ago I put one together for one of our newspapers. It was done in a day. You can find local restaurants and tire shops and barbers -- pretty much anything -- in the Yellow Advantage (powered by Interchange) directory. You can view live traffic cams, take a peek at the latest community blog and photo gallery postings, check the weather forecast or find what's playing at the movies.

The technology is no problem. For the technocurious: It's done with PHP4 and the XML Serializer package, which behaves pretty much like the built-in SimpleXML functions in PHP5. Grab the data and render it in XHTML. The Mobile Profile extension to XHTML adds a couple of handy bits of functionality, such as click-to-call.

The harder part is coming up with an economic justification. At this point you're not going to get enough traffic to be economically valuable. It may feel good to sell a sponsorship, but it's not going to do much for the advertiser. On the other hand, providing a service like this costs next to nothing. The people who do use it really love it, and it's an opportunity to learn what works/what doesn't.

You can experiment in this space easily. Dave Winer, the guy who didn't invent but did breathe life into RSS, has put up a couple of demos: www.nytimesriver.com and www.bbcriver.com, which are simple transformations of RSS feeds already available from the Times and the Beeb. They link through to "printer friendly" versions of the corresponding stories.

It's pretty much the same technique I used on my own example. Don't be scared off by the fact that Winer is a programmer; any community-college intern could do it.

Business Week takes a look at how Myspace is maneuvering to embed itself in mobile phones by getting special Myspace software preloaded in the handsets.

We've seen this happen before -- the "battle for the desktop," which of course was over before it started. Microsoft simply swept aside Prodigy and AOL, which had made deals with various computer manufacturers. Scott Kurnit, who at the time was Prodigy's VP/marketing, said "Microsoft's idea of a level playing field is to bulldoze the other guys' buildings."

This one will be different. We don't have a smartphone platform monoculture or a telecom monoculture. Nobody's powerful enough to run a bulldozer.

There's room for diversity ... so long as that diversity comes with deep pockets and antes up enough money to the telecoms.

The rest of us? I'm not so sure.

You have to be a high-order technowizard to figure out how to install an application on most of the new smartphones. And many of them still make it nigh-on impossible for a consumer to subvert the corporate order by entering a URL in a browser.