WHAT IF, GLOBALLY speaking, the iPad is not the next big thing? What if the next big thing is small, cheap and not American?

America went into a frenzy recently with the iPad’s release. But even as hundreds of thousands in the United States unwrap their iPads, another future may be unfolding overseas on the cellphone.

Forgotten in the American tumult is a global flowering of innovation on the simple cellphone. From Brazil to India to South Korea and even Afghanistan, people are seeking work via text message; borrowing, lending, and receiving salaries on cellphones; employing their phones as flashlights, televisions and radios.

And many do all this for little money. In India, Reliance Communications sells handsets for less than $25, with one-cent-a-minute phone calls across India and one-cent text messages and no monthly charge - while earning fat profits. Compare that to iPad buyers in the United States, who pay $499 for the basic version, who might also have a $1,000-plus computer and a $100-plus smart cellphone, and who could pay $100 or more each month to connect these many devices to the ether.

Not for the first time, America and much of the world are moving in different ways. America’s innovators, building for an ever-expanding bandwidth network, are spiraling toward fancier,costlier, more network-hungry and status-giving devices; meanwhile, their counterparts in developing nations are innovating to find ever more uses for cheap, basic cellphones.

America does not share the world’s romance with the cellphone. Since returning last year from India, I have been struck by how often calls drop here and surprised that text-messaging, so vital to Indians, has yet to entrench itself in America, where so much messaging travels on the Internet.

A recent report by the World Economic Forum and Insead, the French business school, concluded that Americans rank below 71 other nations in their level of cellphone penetration, even though they lead in other areas of connectivity. Some Americans are not connected at all. Millions of others are beyond the phone, so to speak: though they own one and use it, they also own other devices, and the phone is not beall- end-all.

But it is from Kenya to Colombia to South Africa ? the kind of places that have built cellphone towers precisely to leapfrog past the expense of building wired networks, which have linked Americans for a century. In such places, cellphones are becoming the truly universal technology.

The number of mobile subscriptions in the world is expected to pass five billion this year, according to the International Telecommunication Union, a trade group. That would mean more human beings today have access to a cellphone than the United Nations says have access to a clean toilet.

And because it reaches so many people, because it is always with you, because it is cheap and sharable and easily repaired, the cellphone has opened a new frontier of global innovation.

Babajob, in Bangalore, India, and Souktel, in the Palestinian territories, offer job-hunting services via text message. In Africa, the cellphone is giving birth to a new paradigm in money. Plastic cards have become the reigning instruments of payment in the West, but projects like PesaPal and MPesa in Kenya are working to make the cellphone the hub of personal finance. M-Pesa lets you convert cash into cellphone money at your local grocer, and this money can instantly be wired to anyone with a phone.

These efforts arise from a shortage of bank accounts in Africa. But they create the possibility of peer-to-peer finance that could be useful even in wealthy countries - for example, allowing small businesses in rural areas to collect money without credit-card systems.

The phone has also moved to the center of community life in many places. In Africa, urban churches record sermons with cellphones, then transmit them to villages to be replayed. In Iran and Moldova, phones helped to organize popular uprisings against authoritarian governments. In India, the cellphone is used in citizen election monitoring, and in equipping voters, via text message, with information on candidates’ incomes and criminal backgrounds.

All of which suggests the presence of an innovation gap between the world’s richest societies and the poorest ? not in device design so much as in usage.

And there is a question about whether the United States, which gained so much from the Internet revolution, will similarly profit from the entry of billions more people from the developing world into a massive worldwide middle class - consumers now but not yet rich, with a simple cellphone and a lessis- more sensibility.

Certainly, America’s innovative new devices may find important roles. That alone could make their invention revolutionary. But is desire replacing need as the mother of American inventions? Will domestic demand for ever sleeker, faster, fancier devices make it harder for Americans to innovate for the vaster, less opulent world outside, still dominated by frugal wants? Perhaps.

Ken Banks, a British entrepreneur who works in Africa and developed FrontlineSMS, a text-messaging service for aid groups, put it this way: “There’s often a tendency in the West to approach things the wrong way round, so we end up with solutions looking for a problem, or we build things just because we can.”


By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS


GEORGE OSODI/ASSOCIATED PRESS
In places like Lagos, Nigeria, services based around the capabilities of cellphones are the focus of technological innovation.