Smartphones outsell PDAs: "PDAs and handheld device sales slumped by 13% in 2004 to under 10m units, while smartphone sales jumped by 101% to reach 17.5 million, nearly 80% more than handhelds."

Whilst I'm a total believer that phones are where it's at and PDAs are a niche product, the lines between the two are so blurred that I don't see how it's possible to compare the two as product categories in such a financially specific way

And surely while functions which we used to see as the job of a PDA (address book, calendaring, browser, games, installable applications) move into phones and our expectations of what a smartphone *is* increase, it's only natural that we'll see phone sales expand at the expense of PDAs...

The other day Mr Jones pointed out something which hadn't occurred to me: that the very name "smartphone" says a lot about who the target market for these devices has historically been. And if your phone is "smart", then does that make other phones "dumb"? And what does expressing myself through owning a "dumb" device say about me?

The FT plays with ad-supported mobile content. I hope someone starts releasing results for this sort of thing; whether it works or not, we're so early into the industry that it'd be good for everyone to know.

Hmm, actually - maybe this is one advantage of the Java portal route, which I'd not considered before: complete control over advertising sales and the like from within your application, and the means to flexibly alter and play with this. Oh, and not have to cut the revenue with an operator.

Not sure I'd agree with Carlo that "FT and CNN deals do suggest that it's possible to create ad-supported mobile content that is non-intrusive and acceptable", though. There's a significant difference between putting a commercial deal in place to do this sort of thing (which is not to downplay the work that's necessary there) and building a service incorporating this deal which both advertisers and customers will find acceptable.

The line between marketing and deliberate misinformation and deception blurs once more. Sigh... here we are, we have the majority of our populations permanently connected and contactable, we can store and retrieve massive amounts of data on behaviours, preferences and tendencies, and how are we sold to? By means of ham-fisted dishonesty and constant interruption.

"The term Bullshit Marketing summarizes methods where customers are not treated as empowered, smart and connected individuals, but as a dumb mass of idiots."

Lovely quote from a post by Caterina Fake, from an America admiral who was tortured during the Vietnam war: ""This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.""

There was much oohing and aahing at FP Towers earlier this week, when we stumbled across this device: a camcorder-mobile phone combo which appears to be only available in Japan. I'm not sure about how well the lopsided form factor works for day-to-day phone use, but the sheer inventiveness of it, and the cramming in of a traditional-looking video recorder, is fantastic.