Ready for the latest dose of facts and figures to chat over at the nerd water cooler? Here goes! The latest AdMob report, which tracks mobile web traffic from a variety of handset models and operating systems, has found some rather interesting -- if not completely unsurprising -- results. For starters, we're told that the biggest web surfing phone on each US carrier is a touchscreen model, and breaking that down, we find that the iPhone, Nokia N70 and BlackBerry 8300 take the top three spots (in order of mention) globally. As for OS, Symbian is still leading the pack from a worldwide perspective with 43 percent of requests, though the iPhone ain't far behind at 33 percent; oh, and in case you were wondering, Apple's darling generated 50 percent of all US mobile web traffic in February. More numbers in the links below, should you be inclined to visit.

[Via mocoNews]

We'll go ahead and warn you that a lot has changed since 2007, but if anything, the surge in Twitter users and the overwhelming growth in social networking would likely strengthen these findings. The Pew Internet and American Life Project has just revealed some rather interesting stats from its study of age groups and their connection to mobile technology, particularly when looking at the "Ambivalent Networkers" group. Said clump is comprised mostly of males in their late 20s, which are stereotypically connected to their handsets at all times with a smile to go with it. According to the research, however, the majority of this group agreed that "taking a break is definitely a good idea," which was around ten percentage points above the average in the other four groups. We know you're about to tweet this to your 27 year old brother-in-law, but think twice before you knowingly hurt his soul like that.

[Via ArsTechnica]

Outfits like Nokia have been just rolling in profits from selling oodles of low margin handsets in developing nations across the globe, so it's no shock at all to hear that those very countries have propelled the worldwide usage tally well above the 50 percent mark. According to a wide-ranging United Nations report, around six in ten people across the globe now use mobile phones, and as expected, fixed line subscriptions have increased at a much slower pace. If you're wondering just how significant this figure really is, chew on this: in 2002, just under 15 percent of the global population used a cellie. Impressive, eh?

[Via TG Daily]

Thinking that there's only room in this town world for either WiMAX or LTE? Research firm In-Stat would love to disagree, as a new report from it asserts that both will actually live on for at least the next little while. Unsurprisingly, it's expected that mobile WiMAX will "outpace LTE over the next few years due to its head start on deployments," and potentially more importantly, the company believes that WiMAX and LTE will take "very different paths." In fact, it's stated that most WiMAX support will come from fixed network carriers looking to spruce up their existing offerings, while LTE expansion will likely be pushed solely (or mostly, anyway) by mobile operators. To us, it all boils down to support, and it only takes a quick survey of the field to see that LTE has the most of that. For better or worse, it seems the next-gen data war is but beginning, even though we already thought we were nearing the end.

Did you put down Rolando after a mere 10 minutes of play time, never to touch it again? You're a cold, soulless person with nary a fun bone in your body, but you may not be alone. Pinch Media, whose analytics engine can be used to track the performance of participating iPhone apps, has found that merely 30 percent of people purchasing iPhone apps use them the next day, and free apps clock in at a miserable 20 percent. Over the long run, loyal users dwindle to just a single percent of downloaders -- and this is where it gets strange: free apps get used a whopping 6.6 times as often as paid apps, which may not bode well for devs looking to make a decent living off the App Store, Windows Marketplace, Ovi Store, Android Market, and the million other mobile software store initiatives coming up over the next year. It's likely a testament to the fact that your average free app is simpler (and possibly more indispensable day in and day out) than your average paid app -- which means we should all be paying $15 for tip calculators and $25 for speed dialers.

Think you use your mobile data plan a lot with 3G? Just wait 'til 4G is the pervasive protocol -- you'll be pulling down more bits and bytes than you can ever imagine. Or, at least that's the good word from Cisco. Said company has ran some sort of fancy analysis in order to forecast that global mobile traffic will increase 66-fold between 2008 and 2013, with a compound annual growth rate of 131 percent over the same period. It's stated that these projections reflect the impending transition to 4G, and if you can believe it, we'll supposedly be exceeding two exabytes per month of global mobile traffic by 2013. Curiously, it's stated that 64 percent of the world's mobile traffic will be video by 2013, but given just how slow adoption on that front has been, we're more than skeptical. For the rest of the numbers, give the read link a look.

IDC's now assembled a comprehensive look at the phone biz in 2008, and as you might expect, it's not exactly the most amazing year on record. Actually, when you take the year as a whole, shipments totaled a whopping 1.18 billion handsets -- a 3.5 percent boost over 2007 -- but the fourth quarter was downright brutal, seeing a 12.6 percent contraction over the same period a year prior. As analysts have been saying, though, the smartphone market will continue to be the silver lining in a tough market -- shipments of "converged mobile devices" grew 22.5 percent year over year, with North American growth a staggering 70.1 percent. Carriers seem to be recognizing the world's love affair with all-knowing, all-doing phones and plan to blow 'em out big in 2009, but the question remains: with credit tight and businesses losing cash hand-over-fist for the foreseeable future, will the subsidies be compelling enough to let customers in the door?

We can't say we've ever toyed with a mobile that was so difficult to setup that we'd rather move our bank account from one institution to another just to experience something easier, but apparently we're in a quaint minority. According to research gathered by Mformation, some 85 percent of those polled were "frustrated by the difficulty of getting a new phone up and working." Out of the 4,000 individuals that were surveyed, all but 5 percent said they would "try more new services if phones were easier to set up." In fact, 61 percent admitted that they would simply stop using an application if they couldn't get it working right away, with actions such as web browsing, reading email and sending picture messages being atop the list of "greatest wants." Hear that, carriers? That's the sound of lost revenue from selling phones that people can't operate.

[Via All About Symbian]

While you're totally in your rights to keep frettin' over brain tumors, it looks like your eyes are safe from the cellphone cancer -- at least until another study is released. According to a paper published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, a German study involving roughly 1,600 people has found no conclusive link between cellphone use and uveal melanoma. This contradicts an earlier, smaller study by the same researchers that suggested that there indeed might be a connection. Is that clear? It doesn't seem that a consensus will be reached on this subject any time soon, but for the morbidly curious we have years of cellphone / cancer hodgepodge for your perusal.

We'd like to believe the writing's been on the wall for true, classic dumbphones for a helluva long time now, and new survey stats are suggesting that the trend is moving in that direction -- though admittedly not quite at the brisk pace we'd prefer. An NPD Group survey found that fully 20 percent of American mobile users "prefer" to use their phones for browsing and multimedia in addition to making calls, which is a pretty strong statement from a RAZR-using that was totally unaware that wireless data even existed just a couple years ago. Going forward, the big hurdle carriers face is knowledge -- or lack thereof -- with fewer than 35 percent of consumers knowing whether their current models have expandable memory, GPS, WiFi, video, or music capability. As NPD points out, the way to drive revenue in a tough economy might be to help subscribers simply realize that their phones can do more than they realize, which turns into a few extra bucks of ARPU... 'course, cool phone lineups always help, too.

A survey of internet leaders, activists and analysts -- which undoubtedly included one Kim Jong Il -- found that by 2020, the leading method for accessing the intarwebz will not be highly potent Alienware gaming rigs, but cellphones. Granted, the finding isn't all that shocking considering just how ubiquitous mobiles are in comparison to full-fledged PCs, but it's still a rather astounding hypothesis. Comically enough, these very "leaders" couldn't come to an agreement on whether the widespread access along with other tech advances would "lead to more social tolerance, more forgiving human relations, or better home lives." Ah well, we've only got a dozen years to find out, no need to spin your wheels now.

[Via mocoNews]

Really, it's not even fair. A recent look at Q3 2008 smartphone sales in China has found that together, Nokia and Motorola encompass around 90% of all handsets sold in the nation (real ones, we presume). The CCID Consulting report also points out that Nokia's share alone is a dominating 69.3%, with its wide range of choices spanning from low-end to ultra-luxurious helping it to hook consumers from all walks of life. Picking up the silver is Moto with a respectable 19.9%, while Dopod snags the bronze with just 4.7%. Overall, handset sales in China were practically flat from Q2, which -- in today's world -- isn't particularly awful. For the number lovers out there (you know who you are), check the read link for even more statistics.

[Via mocoNews, image courtesy of SymbianWebBlog]

Trust us, we're as sick (if not more so) of hearing about this so-called soft economy as you are, but the statistics here just don't lie. It seems that in times of cautious spending, exuberant cellphones and their respective plans are one of the first things to go, with a number of prepaid-focused carriers reporting significant growth in Q3 2008. MetroPCS picked up nearly a quarter-million net new subscribers in the quarter (double its prior year increase), while Leap Wireless snapped up 156,000 net customers (tripling its year-earlier growth). Furthermore, T-Mobile has reported a gain of 670,000 subscribers in the same window, and over half of those were of the prepaid variety. On the real, we've nothing against prepaid in and of itself, but are you telling us you'd rather chow on fast food (over, say, Top Ramen) and live without unlimited monthly data? Don't kid yourself.

[Via textually]

Okay, so maybe that "thumb failure" bit isn't in this particular study, but it's definitely a logical conclusion to draw, right? At any rate, a recent survey from Portio Research has found the mobile messaging market will likely bring in some $130 billion in revenues by the year's end, and that figure could climb to $224 billion by 2013. Also of note, Americans are said to send "double the number of messages that Europeans average each month," and that's despite the fact that 82% of USers never even use the service. Looking for one last tidbit to chew on? SMS was found to be the mobile messaging weapon of choice in every researched nation save for Japan, which (on the whole) relies more on mobile email than texting.

[Via textually, image courtesy of JFDaily]