"We've seen tremendous adoption over the last six to 10 months from both merchants and consumers," Daniel Wright, CEO of m-commerce company mPoria Inc., said at CTIA. Wright said one of mPoria's clients, an electronics retailer, sold more than $100,000 worth of flat-screen TVs through a cell phone campaign over the holidays.

Apple Inc. inadvertently help restart the m-commerce movement when it put a full-featured Web browser on its iPhone. That lets users surf and shop the Web almost as easily as they can with their home computers. Tuesday at CTIA, Microsoft Corp. announced it too will introduce a full-featured browser with its Windows Mobile platform by the end of this year. Google Inc. also is developing its own cell phone service.

Consumers, meanwhile, may be finally warming up to the idea of buying goods and services with their cell phones.

A survey of released last month by Harris Interactive indicates that 25 percent of U.S. cell phone users who have Internet access on their handsets now use them to buy goods or services.

"Mobile will be a big driver of commerce in the future," said Yahoo! vice president Marco Boerries.

Still, there are plenty of hurdles to making m-commerce commonplace.

Bringing retailers and banks together on m-commerce is one problem. So is making shopping systems that are compatible on different types of cell networks.

The biggest hurdle, though, may be convincing consumers that cell phone transactions are safe.

In the Harris Interactive poll, 66 percent of respondents said they were apprehensive about using their mobile phone to send sensitive financial information.

M-commerce proponents say that perceptions about fraud will improve as cell phone shopping becomes more commonplace, just as it has with Internet shopping.

"In many respects, we look at this time period as the equivalent to the way the World Wide Web was" in the mid-1990s, said Dave Sikora, CEO of Digby, an m-commerce software company.