With wireless phones becoming globally more used than personal computers, how are the web's leading internet players dealing with adding their services to the phone screens of the billions of wireless users in the world? There are literally hundreds of millions more phones in use in the world today than computers -- and in the pacific rim area, mobile phones are probably used more than PCs to access internet content, seeing as though wireless networks are faster and much more advanced than they are here in the U.S.

With this incredible market opportunity, who is leading the pack? Google, Inc.'s CEO, Eric Schmidt, has repeated said in investor meetings and press releases that Google continues to concentrate on mobile offering as a priority area. The sheer amount of mobile devices (phones) should make any CEO of any internet service or product attentive to the burgeoning marketplace of mobile internet access and content.

With Google having a pretty large offering of almost universally-accessible mobile content, it seems to be taking the lead -- although competitor Yahoo! is not standing still and has an equally-beefy mobile content offering, albeit more device-constrained than Google. Google's mobile strategy appears to follow its corporate mantra: Make the content easy to use, navigate and universally accessible. That means Google Maps, Google News, Google Gmail, Google.com and even the Google Personalized Homepage are accessible from any recent mobile phone -- on any global wireless network -- with the standard xTHML miniature web browser.

It's no surprise that Google's commanding lead in the internet search department is pretty solid -- and growing by the day. Its formula for success has been relevant search results in a very timely fashion (in milliseconds) combined with an advertising platform that works incredibly well, and one in which customers actually use and find value withing. Hint to television and radio: adapt to this model or become extinct. Wait -- that's happening already.

Anyway, with many more mobile phones on the planet than computers, will the next battlefront for Google take place on the two-inch screen of your mobile phone? Most likely, it will. Google brass has highlighted the mobile front many times recently, and it you look at the numbers, they're probably correct. Billions of mobile phones are in use today the world over, and higher-speed mobile data networks are being installed in the Pacific Rim, Europe and here in the U.S. (Cingular Wireless and Verizon Wireless, to name a few).

This article over at the Wall Street Journal talks about the mobile universe as the next big challenge for established competitors in the internet space, and I have to agree. There is quite a bit of work to be done -- from the user interface to data speeds to battery life -- but if the mobile phone (or device) can become the next search tool of choice, you can bet Google will be racing to be there first as the de-facto solution.