This paper presents the design of a middleware approach that aims at assisting handheld devices in accessing Grid services by wrapping the computational and resource intensive tasks in a surrogate and shifting them to a capable machine for execution. The performance of the surrogate approach is evaluated with the help of a test scenario. The reduction in computational intensity at the handheld device, achieved through task delegation, is examined and the optimization of communication mechanisms, that reduce the load on a resource constrained handheld device, is presented1 .