ReadWriteWeb

Some people won't go anywhere without their smartphones. Not even the pot.

A new study from 11mark surveyed 1,000 Americans about their smartphone usage, and found that a whopping 75% of American smartphone owners have used their phones in the bathroom. More women have used their phones in the bathroom than men (76% vs. 74%), but men are actually more attached to their mobile devices than women. Thirty percent of men surveyed said they won't go to the bathroom without their phone versus 25% of women.

There is a new entrant into the mobile component app store market. Chupa, an Italy-based startup, has released its mobile component store out of private beta and it includes tools for native and mobile Web application development with support for some of the major development frameworks.

Chupa follows in the footsteps of Appcelerator, which released a mobile component store in September. It remains to be seen if Chupa will have the kind of developer clout that Appcelerator has achieved with a base of over 1.5 million. Take a look at Chupa's offerings and let us know in the comments if its model works for your development needs.

It seems as though companies must be paying attention to that statistic we reported the other day: that Android is the number one mobile OS in the U.S., and the number two worldwide. Because it's not just Facebook showing some love to its Android app today.

Twitter has just announced some major and much-needed improvements to its Android app as well, available now via the Android Market (or via the QR code below).

Research firm Canalys released new numbers today on the mobile smartphone market, and they are impressive, especially when it comes to Android. According to the latest report, the Android platform has grown 1,309% since Q3 2009, going from 1.4 million handsets to 20.0 million by the close of Q3 2010. Android is now eating away at Nokia's top spot among smartphone OS vendors worldwide, where Nokia still retains a 33% share compared with Android's quarter of the market.

However, in the U.S., it's Android that's number one, with 43.6% market share lead.

In a little under 3 weeks time, we will host our second unconference: the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit. It's a 1-day event at the lovely Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, California.

In preparation for the RWW Mobile Summit, we're going to outline the 10 leading trends of the Mobile Web in a 3-part series of posts. We'll delve more into these trends with you at the Summit, because our unconferences are all about audience participation. In this, the first post, we'll outline 3 important design and development issues for the Mobile Web.

Register now to discuss these and other topics at our unconference. The RWW Mobile Summit is being held on Friday 7 May, directly after the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco (2-6 May).

This is part 2 of a two-part article on the mobile e-commerce market in relation to other mobile trends.

In part 1 of this article, we looked at m-commerce's struggles in relation to other mobile markets like mobile ads and video while also discussing some of the issues mobile retailers face today. But another aspect to m-commerce's growth (or lack thereof) is the issue of mobile payment providers. Only recently have we begun to see some changes in this space - at least in developed markets like the U.S. With the recent launch of several new mobile payment services, consumers should soon become more comfortable and open to the idea of using their phones to make purchases.

There's no question that mobile web use is on the rise. Recent reports tell us that cellular networks worldwide are seeing major increases in growth. In fact, there are even concerns that the current infrastructure won't be able to keep up with the new demands. According to one research firm, 3G traffic in developed markets will increase by 20% by the end of 2014 but some operators will face HSPA capacity shortfalls as soon as mid-2010, if not earlier. Forrester Research also recently predicted that more than a third of Europeans will be accessing the mobile internet by 2014.

With these levels of growth, we're also seeing related mobile services getting a boost. App stores, both phone-based and carrier-based, are popping up left and right, mobile video usage is booming, and mobile ad markets are seeing dramatic growth, too. However, there's one area that hasn't yet benefitted from the mobile revolution: mobile e-commerce.

Recently, researchers at the Nielsen Norman Group put the mobile web to the test in a usability study that looked at twenty different web sites on six different types of handsets. The results? The mobile web still leaves a lot to be desired. It's so bad, in fact, that principal researcher Jakob Nielsen, co-author of the study, compared today's mobile web to the web sites of the early 90's.

But is the mobile web really to blame here for the usability issues? Or is this just a matter of people trying to surf a web that has evolved beyond what traditional cell phones and their awful built-in browsers can handle?

Earlier this year at the TED conference, Pattie Maes from the MIT Media Lab's Fluid Interfaces Group showcased a wearable computing system that allows users to display and interact with the Web on any surface - including the human body. The video shows the system's main developer, Pranav Mistry, taking photographs with his hand, summoning up Amazon review data onto the cover of a physical book, displaying information about a person he's just met on their tee-shirt, and calling someone by inputting a phone number onto the palm of his hand.

Look out mobile phones, because in a decade's time wearable systems may be the primary means of accessing the Web!

During my recent trip to MIT I met with Andrew Lippman, an Associate Director at the MIT Media Lab and a Senior Research Scientist. Lippman heads up the Lab's Viral Communications program, which "examines scalable, real-time networks whose capacity increases with the number of members." Among other things, we discussed an interesting new product his students are working on called Fluid Voice. In a way it works similar to how CB radio did for truck drivers in the 1970s - providing a mobile group communication system.