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Are you one of those wired workaholics who fret at wasting five minutes at the airport? Take heart: New wireless services may put an end to downtime altogether. Now that the Web is available on mobile phones from carriers such as Sprint PCS, AT&T, and Nextel, as well as on Palms and other similar devices equipped with wireless modems, the race is on to keep restless digerati's attention and gain that of regular folks as well.

Giga Information Group of Cambridge, Mass., predicts sales of hand- helds and Web phones will exceed those of laptops by 2001, and that could mean many webless folk will finally end up online via their phones. This may make wireless data services appealing to the masses, but even so there are many offerings and deciding among them can be confusing. Most wireless services will be targeted at Web phones because more people buy phones than hand-helds. According to researchers at the Yankee Group in Boston, more than 500 million mobile phones will be sold next year worldwide, compared with about 8 million hand-held devices. By December, an estimated 15 million wireless phone subscribers will use cell phones to get data from the Web.

Eye exam. But phones have an even bigger problem with text readability than Palms, as they have tiny screens. (Sprint PCS NP1000's screen can show 11 lines of text--but its screen is not even as big as that on the smallest Palm.) So, Web phone services have the tough task of giving you the content you want in a form that's legible. That's why all the major carriers are partnering with established Web portals like Yahoo! Microsoft's MSN is now offering a free wireless version of its news and E-mail service (Hotmail) on Nextel phones; Sprint PCS and AT&T both offer Yahoo! and America Online. But if you don't want those, you're not trapped. Web phones' built-in browsers allow you to visit the site of your choice, but decoding the format from the Internet to Web- enabled phone is often clunky. That is, the browsers' effort to squeeze a regular-size Web page into a phone-size screen frequently results in garbled images.

Because the screen size is limited and the connection time dear-- remember, you can be paying as much as 30 cents a minute--you may not want to pay for your phone browser's bad translation. To be certain you'll get to see your preferred sites in legible form, you might want to do your Web browsing by using a new service called Yodlee (www.yodlee.com). You set up your account by going to Yodlee's free Web site, keying in the sites you regularly check, plus the user name and password you use at those sites, and--presto!--Yodlee reformats the sites, and your personal portal is delivered to your Web phone. You can check rental car reservations and flight times and verify bank balances without having to talk to anyone.

Palm devotees who want to do more than just scan headlines may want to purchase a wireless modem. The convenience comes at a cost: The add-on will make your Palm decidedly plump, coverage varies wildly depending on geography, and there's no such thing as a cheap package. The Palm VII ($450) has a built-in wireless modem, but with a clip-on Minstrel III from Novatel Wireless ($370), you can wirelessly outfit your Palm III or IIIx. A Minstrel IIIc for the color Palm costs the same amount, and the wireless connection fee from AT&T, Bell Atlantic, or GoAmerica ranges from $8 to $65 a month. But owners of the hip Palm V's and Vx's may get the best deal, from a new company called OmniSky: a $299 wireless modem, with unlimited connection fees and special software for $40 a month. Unlike the Palm VII's service, which lets you view only the sites of Palm's content partners, OmniSky's browser allows you to visit any Web site.

There are additional options. AvantGo (www.avantgo.com) has a wireless portal, offering news stories. Another service, Shadowpack (www.shadowpack.com), offers news and shopping (from eBay, Kozmo, and Amazon), as well as the ability to forward most E-mail to your wireless gizmo.

But the real irony may be that some of the best services don't require a Web phone or a Palm--a plain old phone is all you need. A new free service, Tellme, acts as a dial-up concierge. Call its toll-free number, ask its computerized operator to list times of movies or live entertainment in your area, and it reads off a selection--no modem, no browser, no cost. Now that's service.