Iphone, Blackberry | featured news

Mobile ad firm AdMob has revealed the dramatic changes the mobile industry has seen in their second annual Mobile Metrics Report, released just this morning. Believe it or not, it was only a year ago that the Motorola RAZR scored as the number one phone here in the U.S. while the iPhone was the only touchscreen device to even make the list of top ten handsets. Only a year later, and so much has changed.

Often in the middle of the night, while his wife sleeps beside him, John Sheridan picks up his iPhone from the nightstand and shakes the device like it was a conductor's wand on fire.

"I didn't really use Facebook that much until I got my iPhone." Sound familiar? That sentiment and variations of it has provided powerful anecdotal evidence over the past several months about the impact smartphones are having on the way people are using the mobile web to connect with others.

The Dvorak keyboard layout, though around for decades, is little-known among the general typing population. Dvorak devotees feel the layout is now being ignored by smartphone makers.

There is no question that mobile browsing is taking off. The latest data from Opera shows that nearly 32 million people used its Opera Mini mobile browser in August, 2009, a 147 percent increase over the year before. In terms of pageviews, Opera Mini delivered 13.9 billion last month, a 235 percent annual increase. That means that each person is loading 436 pages a month on their cell phones, or 14 a day.

Google just announced that its users can now get their Gmail messages pushed directly to their iPhones and Windows Mobile phones. Push Gmail is now a feature of Google Sync.

One big story today is that Netflix added ABC content to its streaming service (it actually did this a couple days ago when episodes of Lost started appearing).

Apple's iPhone is continuing to enjoy a rise in global sales, despite industry-wide falls, a survey says.