If you’ve been following the mobile & tech news over the last few days you might have noticed loads of reports declaring the iPad as a serious rival to Android and Blackberrys in terms of web usage.

According to a report from NetApplications.com, the iPad has already gained almost as much as the two platforms in just 10 days on the market. The iPad has averaged .03% since April 3rd of all visitors to NetApplication client sites, compared to Blackberry and Android which both had .0.4% for the month of March.

Quantcast has also released figures for North American mobile web consumption showing the iPad counting for 5% of all traffic in its first day.

My question is – WHY THE HELL ARE THEY COMPARING THE IPAD TO MOBILE PHONES? It’s not a bloody phone! What’s the rationale here? When did the iPad get categorised as a mobile?

It will be interesting to see if people start comparing other tablet devices to mobiles once Apple rivals get their ‘Me Too!’ products out there. I can guess the answer though.

[Image from Flickr]

[Last update 28th March 2010 - new stats go on the bottom]

I constantly search around for mobile stats for clients and blog posts, thought it would be handy to have a constantly updated list that myself as well as others could refer to.

Enjoy!

Ps: The stats below are links!

The festive season in 2008 was a record one for Orange, with more than 100 million text messages being sent on Christmas day. On top of that over 1 million picture messages were sent by customers on the same day.

Orange said that expected a 10% increase in picture messages to approx 1.1 million being sent this Christmas, giving quite a good indication of growth rates for MMS in general I think.

New Year’s Eve is just as popular with an expected 120 million text messages likely to be sent, compared to 106 million last year and 1 million picture messages.

[Via Mobile Marketing Magazine]

It’s filled with stats (sources included), metrics and fanastic findings about consumers behaviour and marketing in the social media revolution. This is one of the most interesting presentations I’ve read in a long time, definitely recommend you read it.

A condensed and full version below:

Condensed Report – Key Findings

Full Report

Head over to the Razorfish blog to keep up to speed.

Check out this video from Newsweek, nice summary of mobile industry statistics.

More of these videos here.

[Via @Mobil_Marketer]

Are you looking forward to getting your hands on the Pre? Oh you haven’t heard of it? It’s the new phone that Palm are releasing that all your friends are talking about..oh they aren’t? Right then.

Market research firm TNS recently interviewed 1000 UK adults aged 16 to 64 and a massive 26% responded that they would definitely or probably buy the Palm Pre when it’s launched this Friday. An even bigger percentage (32%) said they would switch networks to O2, who have exclusivity, to get the Pre.

Ok first things first, following the news of Vodafone and Orange/T-Mobile selling the iPhone, do TNS believe that these customers are going to switch to O2 when they can finally get their hands on the iPhone? After 2 years of being sold crappy iPhone alternatives, I don’t customers are going to go through the hassle of changing.

I can’t tell you how many friends of mine that asked the sales rep for ‘the closest thing to a iPhone’ on their last upgrade only to be let down by some clunky HTC or Samsung device.

Secondly, if you are a happy iPhone customer and your contract ends this week you are either going to get a iPhone 3GS or wait it out to see what Apple has up its sleeve on the next release in summer 2010. Are you really going to take a gamble and get a Palm Pre for 18 months?

I think TNS has completely underestimated the kind of passionate following the iPhone has here in the UK.

The iPhone 3G S sold 1 million handsets on its first week in the UK. How can the Pre do the same without the same sort of marketing campaign? There has been little advertising for the Palm Pre considering it’s out on Friday, I haven’t even seen a banner ad let alone a TV one.

This survey seems like a PR stunt by TNS and yes I’ve taken the bate, however it also gives me an opportunity to call them out and see if they can put their money where their mouth is. I’m offering TNS a £400 wager that the Palm Pre won’t beat the iPhone 3GS in it’s first week (I’ve been playing far too much Texas Hold ‘Em lately).

So TNS if you’re reading this…

Hitwise reported last week that Twitter finally got more visits than Myspace for the very first time. Twitter accounted for 2.21% of websites visited in the UK in August. Facebook however received 47.50% of website visits making it the number one visited site.

The funny thing is that as Myspace is crashing out in a big way and Twitter is on the way up, I can’t help but notice the similarities between how my friends have adopted the two services.

Around 3 to 4 years ago when Myspace was hitting it’s peak in the UK I set up an account. After getting my real life friend list to about 20 it became apparent after 18 months that none of my other friends were getting involved and the ones that did initially hadn’t logged on for a long long time. Eventually I just ended up accepting random friend requests but got bored of engaging with people I didn’t know.

Then Facebook came about and within a year I had all my friends on my account and everyone was interacting on regular basis with status updates, comments, photos and wall posts.

Now fast forward to Twitter and I’m seeing the same thing happen as Myspace, friends joining up to see what the fuss is about and not really getting it, then never going back.

Looking at my friend list on Facebook, out of 141 friends 13 have a Twitter account (yes I’ve asked). Out of those 6 haven’t updated for 1 to 3 months.

I’m 27 and my friends who are a couple of years older and younger just don’t see the point of Twitter. This is partly because they already have a microblogging feature with Facebook status updates. My younger friends around 21-23 don’t know anyone that uses it in their demographic.

The whole thing about teens don’t tweet sounds about right to me. Seeing as I don’t know any and neither do my friends.

So when I read stuff like Twitter is probably worth $5-10 Billion I’m kinda like reeeallly? Facebook is worth around $4-6 billion and they have more than 250 million users. I honestly can’t see Twitter getting that many.

Anyway it doesn’t matter how many users you got if hardly any of them are active.

I like Twitter, it is a great way to share information (I use it often for blatant self promotion) but it seems to be lacking something. The great part about Facebook status updates is being able to comment and have a bit of short lived banter with your friends until the next update comes. On Twitter I never really get the same feeling partly because I don’t know most of the people I follow but also because the quality and quantity of the update. I’m pretty sure people take a bit more time in thinking about what they are going to put into their Facebook status as oppose to Twitter.

Businesses love Twitter, the media loves Twitter and so do celebs but what about the general public?