Gartner says smartphone sales to women doubled last year, and that these sales figures continue top grow at a faster rate than among men. We've known for some time that Japanese teenage girls were the most aggressive users of state of the art mobile communication devices in the world. We should not be surprised that western women would eventually discover the social and community enhancing powers of mobile technology. Mobile tech is simply not about geeks anymore, it's about community; having something to contribute, a need to participate, things to say, and to learn from each other. Clearly women have something powerful to bring to the table in this area.

In general, women may not be the earliest adopters of new gadgets or technology, this is true. However, as a New York Times article by Laura M. Holson tells us, that doesn't mean women haven't been scoping out the scene the whole time, waiting for their perfect moment to buy. They are experienced shoppers, and when they do go to make that purchase - they've already done all the research and will quickly become their new tech gadget's biggest fan!

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Sales of "smart" phones doubled in North America in the first quarter, outstripping the category's growth in the rest of the world, research firm Gartner, quoted by an Associated Press report, said.

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In the last year the number of American women using smartphones more than doubled to 10.4 million, growing at a faster pace than among men, according to Nielsen Mobile, which tracks wireless trends.

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After years of hype the mobile advertising medium is starting to gain real momentum. Advertisers who are willing to invest in customizing their messages for this new medium are gaining real advantage in their markets, particularly with localization. The future belongs to mobil devices; if you doubt this just look at what your kids and their friends are doing with cell phones; the small size of the screen is no impediment to this group.

The differences between advertising on the mobile Internet and the PC-based Internet are due to the physical differences between the devices -- most notably the limited size of the interface, which creates new user habits and necessitates innovative approaches for those advertising on the mobile screen. This may seem obvious, but advertisers who recognize how to turn these differences to their advantage are far ahead of the game in mobile advertising.

Read the rest of the story at Adotas

Here's more evidence that we're going to be pushing more an more web content and web applications onto mobile devices; eventually everything will be delivered to small mobile devices that are decedents of your cell phone. The future belongs to the wirelessly connected "pocket computer", not the tethered desktop, or even the laptop computer.

Your laptop is likely to soon go the way of 5.25-in. floppy disks, made obsolete by smaller, more useful technology: the smart phone. Based on current trends for low-power chips used in devices like cell phones and iPods , we're likely to see eight times the CPU power in handheld devices by 2010 that we have today... The progress behind such advances isn't the overall boost in processing capabilities seen under Moore's Law (doubling the density of transistors on a chip every two years), Cockcroft said, but the increasing robustness of low-power chips and devices that use them. In other words: handhelds are advancing faster than laptops. For example, laptop memory capacity typically doubles every two years, while pocket devices are seeing such doubling annually.

Read the whole article at ComputerWorld.com

Imagine that you are traveling in an unfamiliar area and you need to know where to find a public rest room; or you need to locate a store that sells AA batteries. Or imagine that you would like to know if any of your friends are within a few blocks of you, so you can arrange a lunch get together. Or imagine that you are trying to figure out what that land mark building on your right is, as you drive from the airport into an unfamiliar city. By now we are all aware of in-car GPS devices that offer driving directions, but very soon, building on increasingly cheap and ubiquitous GPS technology, we will be immersed in a flood of amazing new 'location aware' services that will be deployed over GPS enabled smart phones. Not only will we always know where we are, but we'll always know where everyone else is as well.

With the imminent availability of the iPhone 3G, we're seeing the emergence of a new category of personal productivity applications that will prove as important as e-mail, word processing, and the spreadsheet: Location-aware applications, software that knows where you are and helps you take better advantage of what's around you.

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As mobile data becomes ubiquitous and wireless connection speeds climb higher and higher, the boundary between desktop and handheld is blurring more and more. Your cell phone is morphing into a mobile computer with an interface to the global network; an interface that is becoming as capable as your desktop connection. Combining this capability with social networking will usher in an explosion of localized personal social communication services that will reach deeply into all aspects of our lives.

Mobile social networks are quite popular with the Millennial generation, just as social networking is, reports In-Stat http://www.in-stat.com . Blogging, photo and video sharing, location-based socialization services, games, SMS, and IM will eventually be combined to afford the mobile user the entire social networking experience from a handset application, the high-tech market research firm says. The mobile handset will simply become an extension of the user in most aspects of life.

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