The waiting game for a mobile Internet explosion continued on Thursday at the Mobilize conference in San Francisco, but there were glimmers of reality, too.

"What can I do with this that's going to fundamentally change my life?" asked John O'Rourke, general manager of ISV developer and competitive strategy at Microsoft, referring to a mass-market killer app for handsets that have become as powerful as the PCs of a few years ago.

Even Research in Motion, which won over enterprise users to mobile with push e-mail, sees an urgent need for things that stick with customers.

"The key issue we have in front of us is increasing the number of compelling applications" for both consumers and businesses, said Alan Brenner, senior vice president of RIM's BlackBerry platform. "Today, we are still underserving the market in a major way."

Although most companies aren't yet making much money in location-based services, it's one area where users are getting more active, according to a panel discussion on that topic.

One-quarter of all searches on JumpTap's mobile search engine are for local results, and 40 percent of those are searches for a place where the user is heading, said Paran Johar, the company's chief marketing officer. On Yahoo Mobile, ten percent of searches are for local business listings, according to Lee Ott, global director of Yahoo OneSearch. Skyhook Wireless, which makes technology for showing mobile users their location based on Wi-Fi hotspots and nearby cell towers, has received "billions" of location requests from users, said Ted Morgan, the company's co-founder. "It's an incredible volume, and a huge spike just in the last three months," said Morgan.

The recently introduced location-enabled version of Google Maps for Mobile gets double the use of the previous version, said Steve Lee, a project manager at Google. One thing that's driven that use is the fact that people looking for directions don't have to enter the address where they're located into the phone, Lee said. Even if they know the address, that can take a minute or more on a device such as the iPhone, and that's a disincentive to using the online map, he said.

But the big breakthrough for location capabilities will be integrating them into applications that aren't built around location, they said. For example, Sprint Nextel is trying to get consumer electronics manufacturers to build location capability into devices such as cameras to enrich the experience of using them, said Rick Robinson, vice president of products and services at Xohm.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.