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Anyhoo, more interestingly, mobile search is booming, with 32% of searchers with internet-capable cellphones now searching for local business information, an 11% increase from 2008. Some 60% of smartphone owners search either via their on-board browsers or via applications, and you can bet most of those will be iPhone users.

The study also shows that the most popular local content categories searched on mobile are directories (42%), maps (41%), restaurants (37%) and movies (30%).

A Survey of Platforms for Mobile Networks Research

With the introduction of Android version 1.6, support was added different screen sizes.  The platform does a nice job of letting developers tell the market what size screens their app supports, but that’s only half the story.

This means that every game will have to support 6 unique screen configurations in order to look its best on every phone!

The Android UI team has begun developing guidelines for the interaction and visual design of Android applications. Look here for articles that describe these guidelines as we release them.

If Microsoft is looking for a differentiating feature for a mobile platform, promoting .NET makes a heck of a lot of sense…particularly if Silverlight is supported in the next version of Windows Mobile (which based on this year’s PDC, seems to be turning into a development platform in its own right).

XBOX is confusingly closed. For the only true TV-attached device in the Microsoft product catalog, it is perplexing to me that XBOX isn’t trying to encourage third-party developers to make non-game network-capable apps that run on the XBOX (well, unless you are Netflix, Facebook, Twitter, or another “big” company).