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Until now, the smartphone market has been divided between the main operators, the most blatant example being the agreement between Apple and AT&T. Each brand has its own app ecosystem. More than 300,000 applications will be accessible in the Apple App Store by the end of 2010, and between 50,000 and 75,000 applications will be provided in the Android Market.

Applications are the symbol of the smartphone, but also one of its main values.

For brands that have invested in the mobile app market or want to do so, the breakup of market forces has caused them to multiply applications across platforms. Strategically speaking, smartphones’ individual OS’s maintain control over the attractive and steadily growing market by forcing developers to adapt to a new format for each ecosystem and seeking the consent of the OS owner before an app can hit the market. Apple, Google, Blackberry and Nokia are engaged in a format war that forgets the consumer and constrains brands.

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Motorola announced its first Android handset device today: The Motorola Cliq, with “social skills.” A new, high-performance smartphone is the focus of the Schaumberg, IL-based company’s hope to boost device sales and improve revenue.

Since the success of the Razr several years ago, Motorola has not been making much impression in the wireless consumer market, as independent analyst Jeff Kagan told ComputerWorld today. “Motorola has been stumbling around in the dark,” he says. “This Cliq could be the biggest opportunity for Motorola in many years.”

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Texting has been a ubiquitous trend in teen mobile phone usage, bringing with it educational and ethical implications. With 77 percent of thirteen-to-seventeen year olds having their own mobile phone, this population group has well-defined itself as SMS-happy communicators. Today’s eMarketer spotlights trends shown in a Nielsen study.

SMS usage been increasing steadily for this demographic, but talk time has decreased significantly. Average use per month in the first quarter of 2007 was 435 minutes, which has fallen to 191 minutes in Q1 2009. For text, we have seen a climb from 255 to nearly three thousand (2,899) texts per US teen per month in Q1 2009.

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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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