Networked handheld devices are becoming an increasingly popular platform for accessing software based services, adding significantly to the diversity of requirements that distributed software products must cover. We argue this is a good case for the product family approach. These new challenges are mostly related to non domain specific issues, thus calling for common solutions. In this paper we present elements of a reference architecture addressing these challenges. The major feature of the proposed reference architecture is the ability to adapt applications, both in terms of functionality and the distribution of components between the client and server to the capabilities of the user device, the network connection and the user context and preferences.