ReadWriteWeb

A host of reasons conspire against the general population in whether or not they use a cell phone - smart or otherwise - to use the Internet. According to research by UK-based Essential Research, 76% of mobile phone users don't use their mobile to access the Internet, and there are several barriers keeping them from doing so, whether actual or perceived.

The study, which focused on 2,000 people over the age of 16 living in the UK, found, among other things, that only 10% of mobile phone owners access the Internet on a daily basis. How can this be and why?

While we recently reported that Google's Nexus One had a slow start coming out of the gate, the Android operating system, which is spread across a number of devices, is not having the same issues. A report by Myxer, a mobile entertainment company with over 30 million members, says that visits to its mobile site by Android users grew 350% in 2009, strongly outpacing the iPhone, which grew 170% during the same period.

Micello, one of the more exciting startups to debut at the most recent DEMO conference, is a mobile mapping solution that is basically "Google Maps for the indoors." Where traditional mapping services show everything in the world outside, Micello's goal is to map the world's inside spaces - places like shopping malls, convention centers, retail stores, airports, college campuses, and more. Today, the company is launching its service by way of a mobile application for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

While the iPhone is clearly the media darling of mobile devices in the US, there's no denying that Nokia's handsets have saturated the global market. As part of that global strategy, the company just announced free walk and drive navigation for 74 countries in 46 languages. Today's release of the third iteration of Ovi Maps is similar to Google's maps for Android in that the service offers free turn-by-turn voice guidance. Nevertheless, there's one important catch - maps are cached offline for future use. ReadWriteWeb caught up with Nokia's VP of product and location, Christof Hellmis, for a look at how the company is saving device owners precious battery life.

...Before the Mobile Website!

The White House announced the release of a new White House iPhone app via a late-night blog post on WhiteHouse.gov. Included in the mobile application are features like news items, photos, blog posts, videos, and even live video streaming. That's right - live video. According to White House blogger Dave Cole, the app lets users watch public events like speeches and press briefings in real time using their mobile device. Next week's State of the Union address by President Obama will kick off this effort, delivering live video of the speech to anyone running the free application on their Apple iPhone or iPod Touch.

According to the analysts at research firm Gartner, mobile application stores are expected to generate revenues of nearly $7 billion over the course of this year. That figure is a combination of the $6.2 billion spent purchasing the mobile applications themselves combined with an additional $.6 billion generated through advertising revenues from in-app ads. Not surprisingly, Apple dominates this market, accounting for 99.4% of the market as of last year, states the report.

After AT&T and Verizon announced new mobile rates this past weekend, many users were happy to hear that the cost of voice calls would be reduced for two major American carriers.

Today, the restructured mobile plans and packages went into effect, but the costs, benefits and corporate revenues aren't as simple as a few saved dollars for cell phone calls. In a word, what all gadget geeks, tech-heads and mobile users know is that data is one of the more costly - and ever more popular - aspects of any user's mobile plan. As smartphone adoption increases, how do major carriers' plans stack up to one another?

On Saturday, an exclusive AP report told a story of an AT&T network glitch which allowed some mobile users the ability to login to other people's Facebook accounts. Although according to the story only a handful of people were affected by this glitch, the security flaw could have "far reaching implications for everyone on the Internet," wrote the reporter.

After reviewing the details of the incident, the "glitch" appears to be more of an issue with some misconfigured software at AT&T and less of an internet-wide security concern, as previously feared. That being said, the wireless company regarded the incident seriously and has taken measures to prevent similar issues from reoccurring in the future.

Elia Freedman used to have it made. He was a mobile app developer in the days of the Palm Pilot and he scored bundling deals that got his sophisticated calculator software into the hands of more than 15 million people. Differentiating his product from competitors "wasn't something we had to deal with for years," he says, because of the favored position his app got in pre-loaded bundles.

Now those days are gone. Today Freedman's PowerOne Professional Calculator ($5.99 in iTunes) was accepted into the very crowded iTunes App Store, where competition for visibility is fierce. Freedman's strategy: PowerOne now focuses on being a tool-building app. Template creation for complex custom calculators in sales, medical, real estate and other markets is what the app is all about. He says he wants to solve the "there's not an App for that" problem that many professionals experience when they try to use their iPhones at work.

If you're still paying a per-text message fee, we can only figure one of two things. Either you haven't opened up your phone bill and taken a look at how much you're being charged compared to a monthly plan, or you're one of the remaining troglodytes that doesn't really use text messaging. Either way, you're about to pay more, and the government couldn't care less.

An article in the gadget guide Electronista pointed out this morning that a recent investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice is over and the verdict is in.

Google is trying to come just one step closer to answering any question you might have before you even ask it. This time around, the increasingly omniscient search engine will now cater its search suggestion list on Android-powered devices and iPhones according to your location.

The search suggestion list is that set of terms that appears below the text entry field on Google, made famous by often listing the things we only think - or type into Google.

The only thing preventing Google's Nexus One phone from supporting multitouch features might be Apple's patents.

Allow me to explain: There is nothing in the hardware of this device to prevent multitouch as evinced by Google's comment this morning at their press conference. When asked if the Nexus One would one day support multitouch, a Google rep responded, "We'll consider it." In a word, this means that the hardware is ready for users' pinching and zooming, but the current iteration of Google's software is locked to prohibit multitouch for legal reasons. We give the hackers of the mobile world a couple days to hack the device - after all, it's already been done on the Droid.

The Android platform has grown exponentially since mid-2009, but December's stats show a particular factor that might help catapult the platform to greater heights of user adoption.

In figures just released from mobile advertising company AdMob, the Droid singlehandedly boosted calls to their network by nearly 300 million requests while stats for HTC Magic devices remained static and those for HTC's Dream model actually decreased. In terms of consumer use of the network and acceleration of device popularity, it seems we have a winner.

At the beginning of this year, analyst firm Gartner released a report that highlights eight up-and-coming mobile technologies which they predict will impact the mobile industry over the course of the next two years. According to Nick Jones, vice president and analyst at the firm, the technologies they've identified will evolve quickly and will likely pose issues that will have to be addressed by short term strategies.

According to recently released research from the Pew Center, we're just as optimistic about the web as we were ten years ago during the Internet's first boom cycle.

At the end of 2009, most Americans in this Pew survey have a dismal view of the 2000s. Between the Iraq war, the 9/11 attacks, economic and political distress and the curse of reality television, the decade has been voted the worst in our collective memory. But one of few bright spots in a tense ten-year period was and remains technological innovation, including the Internet, cell phones and email. Social sites, however, still have a way to go in the public eye.

Ford is making a serious bid for geeks' business. Scott Monty, the auto company's Internet-famous social media head, wrote to us tonight with some of the most exciting car-related news an Internet-dependent nerd could wish for.

The next generation of Ford's SYNC-enabled vehicles will not only be rolling communications and entertainment systems. They'll also be rolling WiFi hotspots. Passengers will be able to connect to the Internet anywhere, anytime. Our crystal ball is showing a lot more Ford-enabled conference roadtrips.

If you live in a city of reasonable size, there are probably developers who have already built mobile applications that make it easy and fun to interact with information about the place where you live. But how do you find them?

Community project DIY City has announced that it will relaunch next month as Appify.com, a directory of mobile applications organized by city. Transit info and public records like restaurant health inspections or construction permits are the low hanging fruit, but apps for finding broken parking meters and tracking local politicians have already been added to the directory.

The delays and uncertainty in submitting an iPhone app to Apple for consideration is inspiring some developers to skip the process all-together and release mobile apps that leverage increasingly powerful mobile browsers.

The latest mobile web apps that have knocked our socks off are from a startup of ex-Googlers called NextStop and the Yahoo-owned events calendar Upcoming. Both offer new mobile iPhone apps that can be updated seamlessly, are available immediately and are a lot of fun to use. Could mobile web apps challenge the dominance of native apps on the iPhone? That's an active debate.

This time last year, I wrote about the 10 ways social media will change 2009, and while all predictions have materialized or are on their way, it has only become clear in recent months how significant of a change we've seen this year. 2009 will go down as the year in which the shroud of uncertainty was lifted off of social media and mainstream adoption began at the speed of light. Barack Obama's campaign proved that social media can mobilize millions into action, and Iran's election protests demonstrated its importance to the freedom of speech.

We've just heard from our friends at Google that their mobile app is now available in the App Store for iPhone users everywhere.

In the new version of Google Mobile, everyone's favorite search company has redesigned their results display to show more results at one time. Also, users will be able to open web pages from search results from inside the app. Other new features are pretty impressive, too.