Last week's GSM World Congress in Cannes got little press coverage in the U.S. We were too focused on such depressing episodes as Motorola's (MOT:NYSE - news - boards) warning on Friday of even worse than previously announced results coming up. (After already warning once in December, Motorola now says global wireless handset sales in 2001 will not hit the 525 million it earlier estimated, but rather something less than 500 million. Motorola says it sees an operating loss if that pattern doesn't change fast.)

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Or maybe we were too intent on grim speculation about how Nokia (NOK:NYSE ADR - news - boards) will respond. (Nokia has already said it expects worldwide sales of no more than 550 million units in 2001, lower than its previous forecast. And Nokia warned two weeks ago that it now sees its sales growing only from 25% to 30% in the first quarter, down from the 25% to 35% it had predicted.)

Or we were focusing on Qualcomm's (QCOM:Nasdaq - news - boards) warnings. (We'd better expect at least a two-year lag in rollout of third-generation mobile-phone services, Qualcomm said, as opposed to the more ambitious and more hopeful 2001-2002 rollouts still being talked about by European wireless service providers.)

Or we focused on Goldman Sachs' report Friday. (Goldman downgraded wireless players Nokia, Marconi (MONI:Nasdaq ADR - news - boards) and Alcatel (ALA:NYSE ADR - news - boards); cut its price target for Nokia from $50 to $35 and cut its estimate of 2001 handset sales to just 460 million.)

Too focused and intent, that is, to hear some of the really depressing things that those who attended the meeting on the future of the global system for mobile communications standard, and the rest of the wireless business, had to say. It was a glum meeting; party-hearty types on the plush yachts dragooned into service in the Cannes marina for corporate shindigs were far more subdued than at last year's affairs.

It was often even worse in the sessions.

My favorite example: Intel (INTC:Nasdaq - news - boards) VP and General Manager Hans Geyer was among those who poured ice water on the conferees -- or, if you prefer, tried to bring a sense of reality to the business.

"We're facing a situation where an industry is heading for bankruptcy," Geyer said, "before even a single 3G call is made!"

Also worrying that cell-phone makers and service providers are chasing their own dreams on visions of what consumers really want, Geyer warned against too much emphasis on that wireless will o' the wisp, the so-called "killer app."

Intel cares about this, of course, because it has a nice business selling chips to handset makers. And expects to expand that business dramatically.

"The PC industry has not seen even one 'killer application,' '' he said, after viewing the killer-app-focused visions of Sony (SNE:NYSE ADR - news - boards) and Psion. "We shouldn't worry about whether Sony's (or other companies') vision is the right one. It doesn't matter which vision is the right one. Users will decide what they want. I can't predict what they will want.''

Neither can the big cell-phone makers, obviously. Nor their service-provider partners.

Example: Some Nokia executives in Cannes were almost bubbly in their comments about the future of 3G, aggressively focusing on such present-day wireless-market ho-hums as graphics on your phone, interactive games on your phone and listening to music on your phone.

Except for Nokia's Vice-President of Mobile Internet Applications Niklas Savander, who in a uniquely sober-sided moment gave an unwitting benediction for the congress, and perhaps a prophetic epitaph for so many providers' plans to deliver the kind of goofy applications that are unlikely to draw many dollars in revenue:

" 'If you can't bill it, kill it,' is a very good slogan in the mobile Internet industry now," Savander said.

On the more positive side, Microsoft (MSFT:Nasdaq - news - boards) showed at Cannes the latest prototypes of its "Stinger" GSM cell phone/PDA device.

Actually, though everyone in the industry calls Stinger a phone, that's a misnomer: Stinger is the new Microsoft operating system (surprise!) for multifunction phones/personal digital assistants of the future. The phones will carry their makers' brands to market, though we can expect a Windows-like "logo" program to identify them as Stinger-based.

Samsung, Mitsubishi and Britain's Sendo will be the first manufacturers of the new Stinger-based phones, Microsoft said. Look for the phone in the market by Christmas, Microsoft hinted -- but maybe only in GSM-happy Europe.

Though the current Stinger prototypes are very light, at less than four ounces, they are relatively large, a function of the decent-sized color display Microsoft requires for Stinger products. I've fooled with Stinger prototypes -- not "tested," not "worked with," just "fooled with," please remember -- and I found them impressive.

On the other hand, my wife and I both chose new cell phones in the past few weeks, and we both went unhesitatingly for light and small. She got a new, compact Motorola Startac flip-phone, and I picked up a little Nokia 8600. With the short half-life of cell phones for most folks today, we may abandon these fairly soon -- you've gotta see cell phones as consumables, not capital investments to be amortized over time -- but for both of us, compactness outweighed PDA functionality. (And Net-over-the-phone? Not for us, not till WAP grows up -- or, better still, is abandoned in 3G-land.)

I suspect we are not alone in preferring really convenient, pocketable cell phones that are only very good cell phones, rather than larger, heavier units that promise PDA-like functionality.

Indeed, that is a head-on collision also much-discussed privately in Cannes last week, confidants tell me: While the handset makers want to sell (at the suppliers' urging) larger, feature-rich phones, most buyers still put smaller and lighter at the top of their shopping lists.