Todd Lucier of Tourism Keys explores the impact of the fact that 30% of cell phone users are now browsing the web (and that’s going to massively increase over the next few years) on the tourism industry. Read more here.

Comscore reports (via AdMob):

• there’s now 45 million smartphone users in the US, up 21% in the last 3 months
• Google/Android is the big winner, having over doubled its market share to 9% over the last quarter
• RIM and Apple hold stead in terms of share, meaning their absolute numbers are still growing
• Microsoft and Palm are the big losers, and are likely to continue to do so

Discover Anywhere Mobile notes:

• the rapid adoption rate of smartphones is a sign that many people are choosing to replace their cell phones with something more modern: expect smartphones to dominate the market in the next 2 to 3 years
• we expect Apple to start growing market share again after they release a version that does not depend on the AT&T network
• Palm blew it
• Microsoft will make a recovery next year after Windows Mobile 7 becomes available, but not until its share drops to Palm-like numbers

TechCrunch reports (via Coda Research Consultancy):

As smartphones like the iPhone and Android take over the mobile Web, the amount of data traffic going over cellular networks is expected to grow 40-fold over the next five years. UK firm Coda Research Consultancy forecasts that in the U.S. alone mobile handset data traffic will grow from 8 petabytes/month this year to 327 petabytes/month in 2015. That amounts to a 117 percent compound annual growth rate.

We’d also like to draw attention to the following table:

	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014	2015
Mobile Internet users via handsets	84M	100M	113M	128M	145M	158M
Smartphone traffic as % of handset traffic	79%	90%	95%	97%	98%	98%
Feature phone traffic as % of handset traffic	21%	10%	5%	3%	2%	2%

Next year, 90% of “data traffic” over the next year will be from smartphones. The implications:

• WAP-type protocols are effectively dead, except for legacy applications,
• everyone interested in accessing Internet services are going to replace their “normal” cell with a smartphone in the very near future.

We noticed last week at the WACVB Destination Marketing Tech Summit that there were a lot of Androids amongst DMO attendees – not as many as iPhones, but still a remarkable number.

The latest AdMob numbers tell the story:

AdMob serves north of 10 billion ads per month to more than 15,000 mobile websites and applications. Thus, although its data is about ad rather than page impressions, it can be taken as a pretty robust indicator of how web usage habits are developing and changing over time. Android is the big standout of its most recent figures, with Google loyalists now constituting a cool 42 percent of AdMob’s smartphone audience in the US.

Given the trend lines, the Android’s probably in the #1 position by now and is likely to maintain it, at least until Apple introduces a version of the iPhone that’s not dependent on the somewhat flaky AT&T cellular network.

Just to tip our hand on where our long term thinking is, wouldn’t it be great if people could buy tours, book hotels, plays or theatres, and make reservations within a single app as a single basket transaction.

Here’s an interesting report – Smartphone Owners Now Spending More from Handset, but Poor Site Functionality Is a Turn-off (all emphasis added by us):

Key findings from Compete’s Q3 2009 Smartphone Intelligence survey include:

• 37 percent of smartphone owners have purchased something non-mobile with their handset in the past 6 months.
• 19 percent of total smartphone owners have purchased music from their device, 14 percent have purchased books, DVDs, or video games and 12 percent have purchased movie tickets.
• The most popular mobile shopping-related activities are still research related – 41 percent of iPhone users and 43 percent of Android users are most likely to check sale prices at alternative locations from their mobile phones while they are shopping.
• The second most likely activity is accessing consumer reviews, with 39 percent of iPhone owners and 31 percent of Android owners investigating reviews from their handset before they purchase.

While m-commerce is poised for explosive growth in 2010, consumers are still more likely to abandon mobile purchasing on sites that are not optimized for the on-the-go experience, similar to shopping cart abandonment in the early days of e-commerce. Compete’s Q3 Smartphone Intelligence survey found that eight percent of smartphone owners that tried to purchase a product on their device were unable to do so. 45 percent of those that abandoned the process reported that they did so because the site would not load, and an additional 38 percent left the site because it was not developed specifically for smartphone users.

That is grim and probably totally unnecessary – purchasing products from your mobile tourism product should be as simple as buying music in iTunes. If you’re doing something interesting in this space, we’d like to hear from you.

Link via David Eads.

Gartner reports:

Gartner Says Worldwide Mobile Phone Sales Declined 6 Per Cent and Smartphones Grew 27 Per Cent in Second Quarter of 2009

Worldwide mobile phone sales totalled 286.1 million units in the second quarter of 2009, a 6.1 per cent decrease from the second quarter of 2008, according to Gartner, Inc. Smartphone sales surpassed 40 million units, a 27 per cent increase from the same period last year, representing the fastest-growing segment of the mobile-devices market [...]

Company	2Q09 Sales	2Q09 Market Share (%)	2Q08 Sales	2Q08 Market Share (%)
Nokia	18,441.0	45.0	15,297.9	47.4
Research In Motion	7,678.9	18.7	5,594.2	17.3
Apple	5,434.7	13.3	892.5	2.8
HTC	2,471.0	6.0	1,330.8	4.1
Fujitsu	1,249.0	3.0	1,071.5	3.3
Others	5,688.2	13.9	8,085.8	25.1
Total	40,962.8	100.0	32,272.7	100.0

That’s well on target to exceed 25 million BlackBerrys and iPhones to be sold in 2009.

This poll was done online and thus there’s a few statistical sampling concerns, but none the less there’s several interesting points in here which I’ve bolded. In direct respect to Discover Anywhere Mobile:

• we expect that DMOs will give away their DAM apps, so cost will not be a consideration there
• on the BlackBerry & iPhone, the DAM app is entirely self-contained so we will not be burning expensive data minutes on vacation

Here’s most of the press release (originally from Fierce Mobile Content):

Packing a wireless phone for vacation is a no-brainer for most summer travelers, but a recent survey from Sprint (NYSE:S) shows that the majority of those vacationers are not using helpful travel applications because of budget concerns. From GPS to video/photo sharing to weather and flight information [snip]

“It’s clear that the wireless phone is a must-have device for travelers for calling, but what we’ve also realized is customers aren’t using the device for all it can do in terms of their data experience; there is a wealth of untapped information right at their fingertips,” said David Owens, director of product marketing, Sprint. “Thanks to our dependable and fast network, wireless customers can easily access audible turn-by-turn GPS for directions, get location-based weather information, receive flight alerts and use hotel booking services. We encourage people to enhance their travel experience and take advantage of the value-rich applications and features that are available at no additional cost with Sprint’s Everything Data and Simply Everything plans. We specifically built our pricing plans to match the incredible capabilities on these devices. It is just one of the ways Sprint is differentiating itself in the market.”

Key findings from the Sprint travel/value survey include:

What vacationers pack
Aside from laptops (50 percent), MP3 players (38 percent) and portable DVD players (17 percent), wireless phones (79 percent) are the most popular item for travelers.

Use of travel-related applications among vacationing adults
Eighty-nine percent of young adults (ages 18-34) would ideally like to have access to travel-related applications on their wireless phones, including social media Web sites (34 percent), online/wireless games (19 percent) and restaurant guides (51 percent) while away.

Thirty-five percent of males (ages 18-34) and 24 percent of females (ages 18-34) already use at least some travel applications on their wireless phones.

More than half of vacationers (56 percent) do not use available travel-related features on their wireless phones because of cost concerns. Sixty-one percent of these women and 65 percent of these young adults (ages 18-34) believe that the fee to run travel-related applications on their wireless phones is a deterrent to using them.

Accessibility of vacationers
More than one-third (37 percent) of men misrepresent their accessibility to e-mail and their wireless phone while on vacation. Young adults lead the charge in staying connected: Three-quarters (77 percent) of young adults (ages 18-34) are more likely to check their e-mail while away than their older counterparts (61 percent of those ages 55+).

How vacationers stay in touch
Sixty-seven percent of adults prefer to use their mobile phones to keep in touch with their family members who are not with them. In terms of checking e-mail, one in three adults (31 percent) describe their e-mail checking personality as “compulsive or frequent” while on vacation.

Social media use of vacationing adults
Thirty-eight percent of young adults (ages 18-34) who capture images/videos of their vacation prefer to share the images/videos by uploading them to social network sites.