Hot  on the heels of the N91, Nokia and ICM shared a recent cameraphone usage study. Not surprisingly, people want converged devices and services interfacing directly via cellphones. Nokia even predicts cameraphones could replace handheld cameras and mp3 players in a few years. Almost one in every two or 44% of people surveyed used cameraphones as their primary imaging device with 36% browsing via mobiles at least once a month. 

China has close to a 100 million WAP users presently and iResearch predicts  230 million WAP users  by 2008. WAP usage increased 157% in the past year and that trend is accelerating as China Mobile (the largest provider) continues to create a WAP friendly climate with reduction in usage and access costs.

Pew Internet and American Life Program's "Home Broadband Adoption 2006" report states that broadband users are more likely to create and post content on the Web. One third or 50 million users do so and among broadband users the number rises to 73% percent. Content creation seems to be shifting to younger users and not as tied down to higher income households as before.

Interesting article in The Toronto Star with statistics on the mobile industry , handset sales by type and commentary on emerging markets. As expected, rollout of high end mobile devices continues at a breakneck pace as does consumer desire for services to enable publishing of personal content. Some highlights follow:

Strategy Analytics published a landmark converged device benchmark report comparing the newly released Nokia 900, the PalmTreo 700W and Rim's Blackberry 8700C smartphones. The Nokia 9300 beat its peers in three of five broad categories. Motorola's new Q is also mentioned as the upcoming competitor.

With all the legal issues surrounding blogging I was happy to see this WIRED article last week.  Aimed towards photo bloggers it does address some common questions on respecting the subjects privacy as well as rules across various US and European regions for what is published legally safe.. In a nutshell, if you feel the shot is "risky" - it probably is... so keep these tips in mind before hitting your "upload" button.

Although mobile blogging or moblogging has been introduced in the past by local operators with little success, signs are pointing to its resuscitation with the launching of multimedia phones with blogging capabilities in the market. A prime example is Nokia's recent partnership with Flickr, integrating photo blogging capabilities within the popular Lifeblog sofware for N-series devices.

Krusell the Swedish company specializing in cases and carying accessories for mobile devices has published its monthly report for top mobile phones, pda's and smartphones based on it's sales volume for the period in question. In PDA's Palm is back in the lead thanks to incredible sales for the Treo 700 line but the QTEK line still retains an impressive four out of the top five slots - little change from the month before.For phones, the " Motorola RaZr V3/V3i/V3c has been a regular entry on Krusell's top-ten list since January 2005 and now, 15 months later, it finally climbed the top spot," comments Ulf Sandberg, Managing Director at Krusell Internatinal." See statistics below:

The global market for cell phone premium content, including music, gaming and video, is expected to expand to more than $43 billion by 2010, rising at a compound annual growth rate of 42.5 percent from $5.2 billion in 2004, according to iSuppli Corp.

Text messaging rules in Europe - Over 80% of mobile users in Britain and Germany send at least one SMS a month but new research by M:Metrics suggests that reality TV and the ability to interact with the shows in terms of messaging opinions or voting for contestants is driving SMS usage to unseen levels.