Despite the looming recession, a new ABI Research study shows that even under the worst recovery scenarios, mobile services revenues will continue to grow at nearly 1.2% through 2014, which is a 0.5% loss over pre-crisis conditions.

According to ABI’s practice director Dan Shey, a long economic recovery places pressures on mobile operators to compete on price, and mobile data services allow them to counter that pressure. However, since each region is different, operators should create strategies that lead customers to maintain ‘nice-to-have’ data services or encourage addition of more utilitarian ones.

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Palm (NSDQ: PALM), with webOS, has shown the market that making a platform based on standard HTML, CSS, and web hooks that tie into system level components, was possible and could be done elegantly. Ian Hickson, the man writing the HTML5 specification, who now works for Google (NSDQ: GOOG), would like the browser to be the platform of choice one day. Millions of people around the world use an email client, or social network, or other service that can be accessed from any computer that has access to the internet. Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) wasn’t going to sit still and watch the connected world progress toward web based applications and keep on trumpeting the notion that the operating system underneath is irrelevant.

Helen J. Wang, senior researcher in the Systems and Networking group at Microsoft Research Redmond, is working on Gazelle; a browser that isn’t really a browser that runs on an operating system that isn’t really an operating system. The concept she and her team are developing is currently just a research project, but the fundamental question they’re trying to answer is: what if we built a browser with the best parts of an operating systems?

“Everyone accepts that applications need to run on operating systems,” Wang says. “However, this has not been the case for Web applications; they depend on browsers to render pages and handle computing resources. Yet browsers have never been constructed to be operating systems. Principals are allowed to coexist within the same process or protection domain, and resource management is largely non-existent.”

I’d be more excited if a product group was working on this instead of a research group. Microsoft has the worst track record when it comes to supporting internet standards, so why would they want to mature this into shipping software? Still, cynicism aside, this only confirms Google’s best on the internet as the platform for the future, Palm’s webOS as the ideal way to build an OS, and the growing importance that software that connects over the internet will be to our daily lives. Expect to see browsers on mobile phones only become more powerful and have access to more of the local data that sits on your device.

[Via: Microsoft Research and All About Microsoft]

We live in a very mobile-oriented society. With laptops and mobile phones in hand, Americans are increasingly more willing to coordinate their lives using mobile technology. Cellphones, in particular, are becoming more and more important to the everyday American. Case in point, a new survey, commissioned by Best Buy, indicates that 6 in 10 Americans (60%) would choose to give up alcohol for a week if it meant they could hold onto their mobile phone - a shocking 15% would even opt to have their teeth drilled in exchange for keeping their mobile phones in their pockets. The survey also highlights that many Americans (47%) haven’t yet made the switch to the smartphone way of life because they’re just too confused about models and features.

The Best Buy survey shows that, while mobile phones are quite important to the average Joe American, there is still a lack of smartphone adoption. Almost half (49%) of US citizens without smartphones think those with smartphones are “too connected to their job” - whatever that means.Interestingly, only 62% of those surveyed said they used text messages as a “convenient and quick way to communicate.” We would have expected this particular statistic to be a little higher.

And, to hammer home the notion that men don’t like asking for directions, even from gadgets, the Best Buy survey reveals that women are much more likely to use the GPS features of their mobile phones - 51% of women versus just 33% of men.

Best Buy surveyed 1,000 Americans, half men and half women all over the age of 18, was conducted by telephone May 29-31 by GfK Roper, a division of GfK Custom Research North America.

Full press release after the break.

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A multi-country study released today by Lightspeed Research shows the increasingly prominent role mobile phones are taking in our lives.  With ownership of mobile phones so high and so many different functions now available, it is increasingly important to understand how people are using their mobile phones and what future opportunities there might be for new applications.  ? ?Of the four countries surveyed (the UK, France, Germany and the US) it was Americans (49%) and Britons (30%) who were most likely to agree that their mobile phone was now an essential part of their daily life and they’d be lost without it. Almost half of people in Britain (46%) stated they carried their phones with them most of the time – with the 55-64 year olds most likely to do so.

Younger respondents (18-34) who were more likely to feel their mobile was an essential part of their daily life and they would be “lost without it”. And underlining this finding is the fact that two thirds (67%) of Brits leave their mobiles on at night - and only 14% of those switch it to silent.

Perhaps the most interesting result in the survey is that in some markets there are users who never make phone calls from their mobile (see Chart 1 below). In the UK 11% of respondents never make calls; that figure is higher in the US at 13%. 33% of UK and 18% of US respondents make no more than two calls a week. Texting is hugely popular in the UK with half (49%) sending at least one SMS per day and 2% sending a picture or video message (MMS) daily. Women like to send more text messages than men apparently– with 56% compared to 42% sending at least one text per day; men make more daily voice calls – 41% compared to 32% of women.

Mobile phones have evolved with new features such as cameras, games, internet access and music now commonplace on basic handsets whilst smart phones offer even more sophisticated applications such as video. Whilst some people may feel these are unnecessary add-ons, the results show that in fact these functions are becoming increasingly popular. In the UK the most popular daily function is browsing the web at 9%, whilst on a weekly basis it’s taking photos (38% of respondents), followed jointly by browsing the web and playing games (22%) and sending a photo or video (18%). (See Chart 2 below)

Respondents were also asked about a number of new functions that they might like on their phone. In all countries a satellite navigation system was the top choice, with 49% of French, 44% of German, 43% of British and 38% of American respondents choosing that option. Being able to locate friends, family and children in real time through GPS functionality was the second preference in all markets except for Germany, where concerns over privacy prevailed. However it seems that the Japanese system of using the mobile phone handset to pay for public transport (like an Oyster card) isn’t a popular option – this failed to generate interest everywhere except Germany. Amongst the reasons given for rejecting this function included worries about making the phone a target for theft, concerns about cost, and fears of giving too much data to the phone company.

Commenting on the results, David Day, CEO of Lightspeed Research said: “There is no question that the mobile phone is an important tool for daily life for many of the people we surveyed, and that many people use the additional phone applications such as photos, video, music and the internet. However when we look at take up of some of the current functions, as well as those we may have in the future, consumers do express some concerns. There is real fear around data security and the increased risk of theft and this is something the industry as a whole will need to address to encourage consumers to try new functionality such as mobile commerce.”

If you want to check out Lightspeed Research, and/or get the report, click here.

The generational gap between the youngest and oldest Americans is widening. A new study from Pew Research Center shows that mobile consumption for American adults 30 and younger is shockingly higher than those aged 65 and older.

It might not be a shock to hear that older generations are less technologically inclined. But, with just 6% of US adults 65 and older using cellphones for most of their phone calls while 64% of Americans aged 30 and younger yap it up wireless-style on a daily basis, the differences in mobile consumption between young and old become shockingly clear.

When it comes to text messaging, 87% of the 30-and-younger crowd send out SMS text messages on the daily. That compares to just 11% for the 65-and-up demographic.

And, that generation gap doesn’t stop with cellphones, either. The 18-30 set saw 75% of it’s ranks logging onto the world wide web everyday. That proportion drops to 64% for adults 65 to 74. For people aged 75 and up, there’s something like a 16% chance that they go online daily.

It should be interesting to see how this generation gap fares over time.

[Via: CN]

ABI Research is out with the new report, suggesting that mobile operators will start deploying LTE (Long Term Evolution) networks and offering LTE-based services to their subscribers during next year. As a matter of fact, they argue that at least 12 operators from around the world will do so:

• In the US: Verizon (NYSE: VZ) Wireless, MetroPCS Wireless, and U.S. Cellular
• In Japan: NTT DoCoMo (NYSE: DCM) and KDDI
• In Europe: TeliaSonera, Tele2 and Telenor
• In South Korea: KT and SK Telecom (NYSE: SKM)
• China Mobile will start building its LTE network as well, but will start offering LTE-based services in 2011

These commitments are good news for the infrastructure equipment vendors, and a few operators have already announced the contracts they have awarded. For instance:

• Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU), Ericsson, and Starent won the Verizon Wireless contract,
• NTT-DOCOMO choose Ericsson, NEC and Fujitsu (OTCPK: FJTSY),
• TeliaSonera - Ericsson and Huawei,
• while Tele2 and Telenor are thought likely to settle on Huawei.

More information about ABI’s report titled “LTE - GSM Long Term Evolution” is available from their website.

While cell phones are somewhat recession-proof in their necessity, a recent survey of some 1,110 people revealed a solid 48% would completely ditch their mobile data service in the face of financial crisis. Across all of the services (broadband internet, digital television, fixed voice, mobile voice and mobile data), none of them showed any indication of upgrading to a higher tier of service, and the sizeable majority (67%) wouldn’t change their broadband internet service. That says pretty clearly that most folks see mobile internet services as a luxury ripe for sacrificing since they can always use their home internet, and puts into question all of those glowing analyst forecasts about the future of mobile data. What do you guys think? I’m not sure if I could lose data service altogether - mobile GPS is just too useful for me to not have.

[via BusinessWire]

The folks at AdMob have just released their May 2009 Mobile Metrics Report… and, as per usual there is some great stuff to glean from their findings. This month, amongst all the other data and findings, they take a look at the distribution of users of the iPhone apps in their network as apposed to the typical percentage of ad requests. You can check out the handy chart above for yourself.

Keep in mind, this data is based on the 2,309 apps within the AdMob network in May, and all of the apps in their network are free. For that reason, AdMob is reluctant to shed any info on what the curve might look like for paid apps.

For more information you can download the May 2009 Mobile Metrics Report.

Note: As with all AdMob reports, results are from within their own network, not the iPhone network as a whole.

Thanks John!

Yet more studies have confirmed what iPhone users have known for years. iPhone owners apparently aren’t just more happy with their devices, they’re indeed more loyal to the iPhone brand. Especially compared to the BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) crowd. New stats from Crowd Science have been released that indicate a solid 40% of non-iPhone smartphone users would make the switch to the Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) handset, with a whopping 82% indicating that they would do it all over again.

Even more intriguing is the Piper Jaffray statistic that 56% of iPhone 3GS buyers were upgrading from a previous iPhone, up from 38% the year before. And, a good 12% of early iPhone 3GS adopters (those that braved launch weekend lines at Apple Stores) were ditching their BlackBerry smartphones for the iPhone’s more finger-friendly offerings - up from the 6% of last-year’s early iPhone 3G adopters that left their BlackBerry smartphone by the wayside in favor of the new Apple smartphone.

On the flip side of the loyalty-coin, we have the unfortunate reality that the iPhone brand seems to have an advantage over BlackBerry. The Crowd Science survey showed that just 14% of non-BlackBerry smartphone users would make the jump to the BlackBerry platform. Compared to the 40% of non-iPhone users willing to switch to the iPhone, BlackBerry has their work cut out for them. And, when it comes down to satisfaction levels, the iPhone claims higher overall customer satisfaction compared to BlackBerry users.

“These results reflect the great challenges Blackberry faces in stemming the iPhone stampede,” said John Martin, CEO of Crowd Science. Of course, given enough time, Palm (NSDQ: PALM)’s WebOS and Google (NSDQ: GOOG)’s Android OS might yet prove to be significant challengers to the iPhone’s popularity.

Crowd Science PR after the break.

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In its new report, Berg Insight is predicting that the number of European users of mobile location-based services (LBS) will grow from 20 million users last year at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of nearly 37% to reach 130 million users in 2014. Local search, navigation services and social networking are believed to become the top applications in terms of number of users.

Berg’s senior analyst André Malm argues that that the key enablers for LBS are rapidly falling into place: application stores allow easier access to mobile services, and flat-rate data plans make pricing more transparent. Moreover, operators are opening their location platforms to third parties, while location aggregators have started to provide common APIs for accessing location data. “This together with ever growing GPS handset sales will allow more application developers to create location-enabled mobile applications,” he concludes.

On the similar note, Berg Insight estimates that more than 20% of mobile handsets shipped in 2009 will feature GPS and that the installed base in Europe will surpass 50% of total handsets in 2013.

As for the revenue models for service providers, many of them will rely on advertising, even though mobile marketing and advertising ecosystem is highly fragmented and immature. It will take several years before a successful model has been established that can reach out to a critical mass of active users. At the same time, navigation and tracking services can be expected to remain premium in the future…