ReadWriteMobile

When you control the pipes, you control the ecosystem. At the very least, you can impose your will on a good portion of the environment. This is what the mobile industry has come down to in the United States. Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint have as much or more say about the devices that eventually reach consumers hands than the platform providers or manufacturers.

Why do Android device updates take so long? Ask the carriers. Why are there half a dozen different skins for Android smartphones? Ask the carriers. Why do high-end smartphones cost what they do? Ask the carriers. Why did Nokia have to wait to enter the U.S. market with its new Lumia line? Ask the carriers. Why are there a ton of different versions of the Samsung Galaxy? Ask ... you get the picture.

The technology industry loves to come up with pet names and terms for trends. To name a few that have come out in the last year or so: gamification, social dynamics, check-in, onboard, pivot, open graphs, closed graphs, social graphs. Lots of graphs. Most of these words and terms are fine, if overused, additions to lexicon and fit well within the nerd nomenclature. Yet, there is one that should be banished before it has a chance to spread its wings.

Mocial.

Mocial is a mix of mobile+local+social. To be fair, this is definitely a trend in the mobile realm. Apps are becoming more social and are increasing engagement by being localized to that person. At the same time, the tech industry may have jumped the shark though on creating this pidgin.

My tablet goes everywhere I go. I use it for work, for navigation, for music streaming in the car. It always has my work email, which I do not push to my Android phone for fear that it would never stop buzzing. I tweet from everywhere, all the time with it, read my Kindle and various news apps.

I fundamentally disagree with the assertions made by the R. Paul Singh, the CEO of SocialNuggets, in his guest post on ReadWriteMobile earlier today. He said that Wi-Fi is all you need for a tablet. I want to have 3G/4G cellular data on my tablet. Otherwise the device is more or less useless to me outside the house.

While walking through one of the T-Mobile or AT&T or Verizon stores this holiday season, you may be tempted to buy a tablet after looking at the low price tags on some of them. However, before you buy a tablet from your mobile service provider, understand their total cost and see if you even need a tablet with 3G/4G, or if Wi-Fi will suffice. You might be surprised at how much money you can save.

Indeed, according to a new study from NPD/Connected Intelligence, a higher percentage of tablet users are buying Wi-Fi-only tablets.

Many corporations now allow their workers to bring their own devices such as cellphones and tablets to the office. But this can backfire if the appropriate mobile device management (MDM) policies are not properly enacted. As an InformationWeek Analytics 2011 Strategic Security Survey has found, only one in three respondents deploy MDM as part of a comprehensive security policy, a point also noticed by Forrester Research.

Writing for Wharton's blog, Todd Hewlin and Scott Snyder in "Unwiring the Enterprise: Are You Ready to Lose Control?" mention an interesting concept, that of wireless becoming the last foot for moving cloud content to within arm's reach of every person on the planet. I thought about this and wonder why IT and telecoms folks always dis their customers in this fashion. It isn't the last mile or the last foot, or the last micron: it is the first foot! The customer should come first, always. It is time to change this thinking.

With the sale of the iPhone 4S comes Siri, the voice behind the machine. And while it has a generally pleasant female voice and some interesting personality quirks, we would really like to see replaceable modules for the times that we want someone else to talk to us. A phone should match our moods, or remind us of our favorite computer heroes and villains of yore. Here are my own personal favorites.

This week, GetJar teamed up with Zynga to announce the debut of new mobile games: Mafia Wars and Zynga Poker. Mafia Wars, already a familiar name to Facebook users, is a GetJar exclusive, meaning it's being launched first on the GetJar.com website prior to any other app store. Zynga Poker is an Android-only offering.

The announcement of new games, however, is only mildly interesting. What's really notable about this news, at least in our opinion, is that Mafia Wars is an HTML5-powered, browser-based game. And its exclusive launch on GetJar points towards the possibility that this third-party app store could soon serve as a worthy launchpad for many more HTML5 mobile Web applications in the near future.

According to a recent survey of 78,835 mobile phone customers in the U.K., less than 5% of women would select an Android device as their next smartphone. The problem, explains Belinda Parmar, Founder of marketing agency Lady Geek which conducted the survey with YouGov Sixth Sense, is that "Android provides a perfect example of how not to market a platform to women." Few women know or care about what Android is or how it can benefit their lives, she explains.

Parmar plans to detail the survey's findings in a presentation at Droidcon, a London-based Android conference occurring later this month.

Among smartphone users, Apple iPhone fans often poke fun at Android users for having to put up with so-called mobile "crapware," the pre-installed applications that come on new Android smartphones. Mobile carriers have taken to pre-loading their phones with apps for their own services, or those from third-party developers. For some users, this bloat is made doubly worse as the apps can't be uninstalled.

But not all "crapware" is bad. In fact, most consumers even like it. Case in point of bloatware we might not mind: Amazon's Kindle mobile application is now going to be pre-installed on Verizon's Android phones.