Method and apparatus for providing internet content to SMS-based wireless devices

A method and apparatus for providing hypermedia content maintained remotely on a network to a wireless device without a browser are described. A Short Message Service (SMS) request for Internet-based content is received from a wireless device (100) on a wireless network (102) at a proxy server (108) via an SMS Center (SMSC) (212). The proxy server transcodes the SMS request from a character set of the SMSC to a character set of an application and extracts a keyword from the trancoded request. The proxy server looks up the extracted keyword in a keyword-to-URL mapping to identify the URL of an application associated with the keyword and constructs an HTTP POST operation containing the keyword and the URL which is submitted to the application over a wireline network such as the Internet (215). The proxy server extracts the requested content from a received HTTP response from the application in response to the POST operation, and then translates the content from the content-type used by the application to the content-type used by the SMSC and transcodes the content from the character set used by the application to the character set used by the SMSC. The translated and transcoded content is then sent as an SMS response to the SMSC, for subsequent delivery to wireless device as an SMS message.