People use cell phones more often and in greater numbers, but how do they spend their time? A U.S. mobile phone user survey from Azuki Systems, Inc. profiles trends and emerging behavior in surging adoption and mobile time usage.

54 percent of those surveyed said their mobile phone usage had increased by more than 25 percent over the last two years and twenty percent said usage increased by more than fifty percent.

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Instead of downloading ridiculously useless applications on your iPhone, like the famous lighter, here is below a preview of the list of the 10 iPhone Finance Apps That Count, published last week by Mint.com, the money management website that is taking off (see video presentation of Mint).

I would personally not use all of them - on the iPhone that I don’t have - but I would definitely pick the Bloomberg Mobile. And if HSBC had a Mobile Banking iPhone app where customers could find out where the nearest branch or ATM is located, and also check their available balances, I would definitely go for it and upload this second application… Anyway, take a look.

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Curiosity burns for the “GooglePhone.” The community gestalt will foster support, after the first whiz-bang features become more integrated into workflow. But in the meantime, a compass feature sure is fun, and iPhone owners are already bemoaning the Copy & Paste now available on the G1. Mixed reviews abound and completely contradictory aesthetic judgments proliferate. All signs point to delightful complexity: an ideal first day.

GIZMODO’s article on the G1’s Five Most Obnoxious Flaws complains of an unsurprisingly Google-centric interface, lack of video support and storage capacity. It is contradictory that an open platform would require a Google account in order to operate most of the phone’s key features. Hopefully a third-party application shall circumvent this problem before too many potential users put the product out of mind.

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Welcome to day one of the first cell phone to support Google’s Open Source Operating System, Android. With the age of the iPhone well under way, one is moved to wonder what a single-touch screen and a community-based application network have in store for us.

TechCrunch let loose some specifications yesterday:

• In-store, immediate sales only available in stores within 5 miles of a 3G covered area. If a store is beyond that range, representatives will walk customers through a T-mobile.com purchase
• One touch access to: Search, Maps, Gmail, YouTube, Calendar, and Google Talk
• Gmail account and data plan required
• GPS
• 3.1 mp camera, no video recording
• No stereo bluetooth (A2DP)
• Dimensions: 4.6 x 2.16 x 0.63 in
• Weighs 5.6 ounces
• 480×320 65K color screen
• 5 hour talk time, 130 hour standby time
• Expandable up to 8GB

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A Thursday afternoon panel at GigaOM’s Mobilize conference was “Thinking Experientially: What creates good mobile user experience?”

Wired Gadget Lab Editor Dylan Tweney moderated this panel of mobile product specialists. The team was made up of Jason Devitt, CEO of cellular phone call and text tracking site Skydeck , entrepreneur Jyri Engestrom of Jaiku and now Google, Mobile Design Strategist Rachel Hinman of Adaptive Path, and Jeff Taylor of Hutchinson Whampoa /3.

The popular approach to new mobile design seems to leave it at, “It’s a PC that you carry in your pocket.” This leads to keyboards with toddler-fingertip buttons, limping Internet and nauseating interfaces. The process of creating an intuitive, native mobile experience seems to be as easy as taming a rogue unicorn, judging by the mobile market today. The concensus of the panelists was that the structure of the wireless world is partly to blame. With a tangle of service providers, software developers, hardware manufacturers and others, the need to innovate is displaced by the need to make money as quickly as possible.

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Mobilize, “the next generation mobile conference” presented by the GigaOM team, takes place today in San Francisco. Selected coverage follows below from this morning’s speakers.

Hyperconnectivity, Wideband and Innovation
Om Malik spoke with John Roese, chief technology officer of Nortel Networks on the issues of developing high capability networks. The saturation of the Western European market (112 percent mobile users), including Italy (147 percent) makes an overwhelming argument about the importance of system robustness. The US trails sadly behind other countries in terms of the quality of the 3G network and market consistancy.

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A different kind of “march of the penguins” (the penguin being the Linux mascot) occurred as technology users and enthusiasts from around the world descended upon San Francisco, CA Aug. 4- 7 for the 18th annual LinuxWorld Conference and Expo.

In support of open source technology and Linux-based initiatives, the conference sessions and presentations highlighted Linux’s new role in consumer technologies, including operating systems, mobile phone capabilities, and the corporate desktop.

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Mozilla Labs is calling developers, designers, and everyone else for their “concept series,” an initiative “to make it easy to contribute to the development of the online experience.” The task is to create visions for the future of online activity and projects for Mozilla labs at large. Three project videos are already available online: a mobile Firefox from Aza Raskin, a bookmark and history GUI from Wei Zhou, and an all-purpose collaborative browser called Aurora.

By far the most produced and didactic video, Aurora from Adaptive Path has an intuitive and extremely powerful interface. The browser analyzes the Pages and graphically-represented data, which become labeled groups floating in a 3-D environment. The Z-axis of the space points away from the user, representing time, and less recently used information starts to drift farther away.

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We’ve been covering the world of in-flight Internet access a few times these past months. Last Tuesday, August 5th, the airline company Delta Air Lines [DAL] announced that it will offer WiFi on all domestic mainline flights beginning next year. Delta’s entire domestic fleet will be outfitted by the end of 2009.

“Our customers asked for in-flight connectivity, and we’re responding by rolling out the most extensive Wi-Fi network in the sky. Beginning this fall, our passengers will have the ability to stay connected when they travel with us throughout the continental U.S.,” said Richard Anderson, Delta’s chief executive officer.

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Apple [AAPL]’s campaign for the iPhone 3G is “Twice as fast. Half the Price.” Both claims should come with caveats. While the symmetry of the slogan is nice, Apple’s so-far-successful attempt to market the iPhone 3G to more mainstream users is, to some, less-than-truthful. Apple’s ad fails to tell the full story about pricing or the speed.

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