Despite consumers' persistent lack of interest in video telephony and photo messaging, operators are hopeful that they will have more success with video messaging. The idea behind this service is that a mobile user on a voice call can simultaneously send live video of what they are looking at to the person on the other end of the phone.

While there is a certain novelty value to such services, Gartner believes that they are unlikely to become a big revenue generator. Working with vendors, carriers will first need to offer a service that is simple and easy to configure and use.

Services for consumers have been relatively slow to take off outside Japan. RIM's BlackBerry has seen some success in all geographies, but it addresses business users. Usability and the pricing of services have been the major obstacles to wider consumer adoption. Even among enterprises, the number of users remains small, and the market is still somewhat elitist, due to the total cost of ownership (TCO) of supporting wireless email users.

In the public e-mail space, Gartner expects that the majority of Internet e-mail providers will soon support simple wireless access to their accounts, using quasi-standard technologies such as browsing, SyncML and MMS, which allow them to serve a wider range of devices. While carriers will be able to continue to sell data plans for secure enterprise-based e-mail services, consumer e-mail is likely to be absorbed into existing data subscriptions.