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Once upon a time, smartphones were mostly about connecting busy professionals with their email accounts while on the go. Now that smartphones have reached the mainstream consumer market, however, people are looking for more than just email access - and a surprisingly large number of smartphones hardly ever leave their owners' homes.

According to a new study from Web analytics firm Compete, 74% of smartphone owners now primarily use their devices for personal reasons, and they often spent the most amount of time with the device at home.

RIM's BlackBerry platform is still the most popular mobile smartphone platform in the US, but Google's Android was the big winner in the last quarter of 2009. According to comScore, Android's share of the US mobile market more than doubled from 2.5% in September 2009 to 5.2% in December. While the Nexus One might not be a bestseller just yet, it's clear that the Android platform is poised for rapid growth in the next few months as more and more manufactures continue to release Android-based phones.

According to new data from ChangeWave Research, both usage and consumer sentiment towards Google's mobile operating system Android has increased over the past several months. As of December 2009, the research firm's survey shows that 4% of all smartphone owners now use a phone running some version of the Android OS. That's an increase of 200% since the previous survey released in September.

Are iPhone users really that bad? We're not buying it. It's odd that a consumer electronics shopping site would sponsor a study that paints such a lousy picture of iPhone owners, but that's exactly what Retrevo.com has done. For whatever reason, the results of their recent report on smartphone owners in the U.S. has returned some unflattering figures about those who own Apple's ubiquitous handheld, the iPhone, as compared to the more business-minded folks who choose a Blackberry instead.

Earlier this week, electronics retailer Best Buy announced a new mobile backup service called mIQ. Designed to compete with similar services like Apple's MobileMe or Microsoft's My Phone, mIQ offers up to 1 GB of storage space in the cloud for photos, video, contact and calendar information, SMS messages, and more. However, unlike its competitors, mIQ has a couple of distinct advantages: it's 100% free and anyone can sign up to use it.

According to a new report from web analytics firm Compete, 1 in 3 smartphone users use a location based service at least once a month. Weather and navigation apps are currently the most popular location based services, followed by apps that provide store locations, movie showtimes, and local news. Interestingly, there also seem to be a number of highly underserved markets. According to Compete's research, users also want to be able to receive local alerts about topics like traffic jams and gas sales.

According to a new report from tech research firm Forrester, the smartphone as a standout mobile category is a shaky paradigm with rapidly shifting parameters. The emergence of mobile operating systems, the ability to install and run third-party apps, and the wide availability of multimedia features (camera phones, video phones, and MP3-playing phones abound) have all been game-changing developments in the mobile field, but they are quickly becoming commonplace. According to a recent New York Times feature, around 50 percent of mobile devices will be "smart," multimedia-enabled gadgets within the next three to four years, and these devices could constitute a full 90 percent of the mobile market by 2015.

So, what defines a smartphone as all phones become smarter? What is the exact trajectory of the mobile learning curve?

Yesterday, T-Mobile stocked their stores with G1 handset, the first smartphone to feature Google's mobile operating system "Android." Along with the device itself, the Google Android Market also went live. There, developers are offering a number of applications for installation on the new phone. However, the Android Market isn't the only place to get apps. Both Handango and MobiHand have app stores of their own. Will this open ecosystem be good for the "Google phone" or will it lead to consumer confusion?

A new report from Handango - a distribution network for smartphone applications across the BlackBerry, Palm, Windows Mobile, Symbian OS, and Linux platforms - states that gaming apps have jumped in popularity this year. In a report entitled First Half 2008 Handango Yardstick, Handango's regular review of the global smartphone content industry, it notes that "the Games category leaped from fourth place at year-end 2007 into the second spot behind the Entertainment category, for the first time in Yardstick history."

Together, entertainment and gaming apps account for 42% of unit sales of the top ten categories. Meanwhile, business and professional apps rank third with 15% and Productivity applications (e.g. address book and calendar) fourth with 9%. Note that these are similar trends to the iPhone App Store, where gaming also dominates. Handango also reported that the Blackberry had the most app sales. Below are the top 10 lists for each major smart phone that Handango covers, courtesy of the Yardstick report:

At first glance, it seems like SkyData is trying to do too much. This mobile app mashes up data from your email contacts, your social network contacts, your business contacts, as well as business data from CRM applications like Salesforce.com, location-based info from sites like Yelp, travel info, news and RSS feeds, and even Google Maps. Is this a case of info overload or is this an app every business user will want to have?