• 4 billion global mobile subscribers (ITU, 2009)
• In 2009 half of all connections to the internet worldwide will come from a mobile phone. (eMarketer, 2008 and 2009)

This is a bit hard to believe even for me, as I would imagine that most cellphone customers don’t have a data plan.

MetroPCS is a prepaid cellphone company which offers fully unlimited plans starting at just $40/month. They have 5 million subscribers and just entered the New York market. I was aware of their offerings but not the data promotion for new voice customers: free internet for the first month and if they choose to upgrade, unlimited data for a flat rate. As a result nearly half of their users optin for this down the line. The big point here is simplicity as all consumers demand an unlimited data access just like with our home ISP.

The original article has a lot of interesting mobile stats from Google indicating current trends:

In a few years the mobile phone will become a mobile computer with the ability to make voice calls being just one of the features.
Following that, there will be a move to the web-enabled applications that live in the browser just as we have seen on the PCs. But for now the hype is still around installable native applications.

We picked three that have most potential and utility:

Location Awareness
Location-sensing technologies (powered by GPS as well as Wi-Fi and triangulation) provide live information on users’ locations to enhance mobile social networking applications. Over the next two years, this sort of technology is expected to become more mainstream. There are still a bunch of privacy questions around this: Do you want all your online friends and acquaintances to really know your exact location? Will turning off location awareness signal mean that you’re up to something sneaky (so asks the suspicious wife, husband, or boss)?

Mobile User Interfaces
With mobile applications the User Interface is crucial as the screen size is limited and the user is usually multitasking. Apple has been so successful because of their UI. Businesses will need to mobilize their B2E (business-to-employee) and B2C (business-to-customer) applications to keep up with a rapidly-evolving standard for mobile user interface.

Mobile Widgets
Widget-like applications will become more common especially when reaching consumers. Gartner highlights that mobile web still has challenges ahead. For example, there are no standards for browser access to handset services like the camera or GPS.

Mobilestead will help businesses to meet their mobile objectives and leverage the above to increase productivity, save money and increase customer satisfaction.

For more information on the above technologies and the full list of 8, you can read the full report on Gartner’s web site.