Happy Monday! comScore Report suggests Mobile’s Hotter than Ever

A hot-off-the-press comScore report presents the 2012 Mobile Future in Focus – and things are looking good for mobile!

ComScore examines last year’s mobile landscape through “an exploration of key trends driving smartphone adoption growth, mobile media use in categories such as social networking and retail, mobile ecosystem dynamics, and shifts in multi-device digital media consumption.”

From a proliferation of public WiFi access, an insurgence of app usage in health and commerce to the ongoing battle for top mobile platform – now led by Apple and Android – the report shows that mobile has been the hot topic in tech since early last year.

The report is lengthy and covers those myriad avenues of mobile influence, but one thing is consistent across mobile usage and industries: as mobile continues to grow as a part of core comprehensive marketing strategies, it becomes increasingly important for brands to understand how current trends are shaping the mobile environment – and how the mobile space is shaping future trends.

The report does highlight a few interesting emerging trends, one of which is mobile’s advancement of social media users to interact with brands in the commerce arena.

The study found that, by the end of last year, nearly one in every five mobile (smartphone) users scanned product barcodes and one in eight compared prices on their phone while shopping in an actual brick-and-mortar location.

As mobile retail usage grows retailers are faced with the challenge of understanding how audiences interact with their mobile devices while shopping to take advantage of any opportunities to increase customer conversation and conversion.

Of course, gender behaviours varied – as they are want to do – when it came to mobile commerce. Males preferred to do product research on-the-go, while females were more likely to use their devices to share their shopping experience socially (ahem, Pinterest?). The latter finding is interesting considering we think 2012 will showcase and interesting menage a trois for the mobile + commerce + social media equation.

What do you think? Will mobile and social media continue to change the way we browse and buy from retailers? Tweet us @plasticmobile with your thoughts, comments and general mobile musings.

The buzz continued to circulate over the weekend about RIM’s future in the mobile space. Research In Motion Inc. is currently meeting with a stock price that values the company at less than the by and large regard of its assets. After myriad product delays and an international three-day service outage, RIM’s stock price has fallen more than 68% this year and was trading this morning at about $18.61 per share.

However, two weeks back an article in the Los Angeles Times suggested that, although the faster iPhones and Android devices have been raking in market share from Research in Motion’s once-addictive and adroitly nick-named “CrackBerry,” analysts and executives are not ready to count the smartphone out just yet.

Further commentary over the weekend seemed to imply the that upcoming BBX operating logic, which will run on a new line of RIM’s BlackBerry tablets and smartphones, might just be the company’s salvation, bringing a third contendor back into the current two-man race.

BBX Photo Leaked on The Verge

As reported today, “People reckon it’s a melting ice cube,” Leon Cooperman told  Bloomberg. ”We reckon the new operating logic is going to surprise people.” BBX, which is set to launch early next year, will enable apps built for Google’s Android operating logic to run on BlackBerry devices. The new line of BBX phones will also focus more on touchscreens and less on physical keyboards, which have been a hardware trademark of BlackBerry phones. Those fairly lacklustre items aside, we still know very little about the BBX. But that isn’t deterring Leon Cooperman, RIM investor and hedge-fund manager slash founder of Omega Advisors Inc., which bought a sizeable stake of about $28 million in RIM last quarter.

According to the Dow Jones Newswires, he also recently reported a purchase of 1.43 million shares in RIM in a regulatory filing, betting that the BlackBerry-maker’s new devices are attracting customers. “We bought (the shares) because we think (the stock) is undervalued, and we will be proven right or wrong in a few weeks when they report results,” Cooperman is quoted as saying in an article in businessmobilebriefing.com.

While we at Plastic Mobile love a tale of the underdog rising to acclaim, we’re not convinced we’d bet our beer money on the new BBX operating system.

Tweet us @plasticmobile with your verdict – will Cooperman and RIM be high on a much-needed success, or will they live to eat their BlackBerries?

Android vs iPhone vs BlackBerry – The Good, the Bad, the Ugly, and the Einstein!

Which one are you?

On October 20, 2010 Apple held an event called “Back to the Mac” at which Steve Jobs, Apple CEO revealed the upcoming Mac technologies.

This event boldly showcased Apples focus on mobile technology; revealing their move to unify their mobile offerings with their Macs. The newest sensation was the hijacking of the AppStore for the Mac, which was a bold confession of just how important iPhone applications have been in Apple’s success of grabbing larger shares of the Smartphone markets. Bringing FaceTime, the VideoConferencing capability from the iPhone and iPad to the Mac was just another affirmation of the power of their mobile technology in Apple’s overall success; which in essence is turning into their strategy.

Further proof of mobile playing even a larger part of Apple’s marketing strategy was revealed by the introduction of Apple’s next generation MacBooks, the all new MacBook Air, inspired by the iPad (“MacBook meets the iPad”). MacBook Air is simply a more sophisticated version of the iPad, sleek and neat, with more computing talent but naturally slightly less mobile.

The product lineup, features in the new operating system and the Mac AppStore all seem to point to a direction that has mobile focused at its core. Just two years ago many believed that Apple had no right entering the very saturated phone (device manufacturer) market and today the iPhone technology is helping pave the path for their core Mac business.