Using your cellphone as your wallet - priceless.

Cellphones already play music, scan the Internet, send and receive text messages, and snap photos. Are they going to take the place of our wallets too?

Some big players in telecommunications and finance, including Motorola, Nokia, Sony, and MasterCard, think the answer will be yes, that people will rush to make their phones into a kind of magic wand that effortlessly makes purchases or retrieves information for them.

Americans are already starting to wave a card or key-chain fob near a receiver to do things like travel on a bus, buy gasoline, or unlock a door. But the real shift will happen, some observers say, when mobile phones, with their additional capacities, can do the same thing.

Imagine it's 2009: You're at the movies and see a poster for a coming attraction. You pass your mobile phone within a few inches of the poster, which is embedded with a radio frequency (RF) chip, and download a trailer for the movie, which you view on your phone's screen. The phone then connects you with a website that offers to sell you a ticket and give you a discount on the movie's soundtrack, which you can have either sent to you on a CD or downloaded directly into your MP3 player.

The idea of using mobile phones as vehicles for commerce has been around for years. But this year it finally seems to be getting some traction as major players agree on standards. Last month, Motorola and MasterCard announced they were teaming up to do a field trial of mobile phones equipped with chips that allow them to pay for products. "In essence, your phone will become your wallet, key chain, and your ID," said Ron Hamma, a Motorola vice president, adding that the new handsets have "the potential to be a lifestyle-changing device."

Some industry observers are more reserved. "We are cautiously optimistic that over the medium-to-long term this is an idea that has legs," says Ed Kountz, a senior analyst for emerging technologies at TowerGroup in Needham, Mass.

Next year will see more field trials and pilot programs using the new phones, says Mohammad Khan, president and chief operating officer of ViVOtech Inc. in Santa Clara, Calif., which makes software that stores credit-card information in an "electronic wallet" within phones as well as terminals for merchants who process purchases. By 2006, he predicts, phones using "near field communications" (NFC) will go mainstream with millions of users. By 2009, more than half of cellphones will be capable of making such payments, according to one analysis he's seen.

The advantage of mobile-phone "wallets" over cash or conventional credit cards centers on speed and convenience. Customers don't have to pull out their wallets and hand over cash, take out and swipe a credit card, or sign a sales slip. By waving a cellphone within a few inches of a receiver - a so-called "contactless payment" - customers make their purchases faster. Early tests indicate that they also tend to spend more using that method.

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