…will store your latte preferences and order it for you when you walk up to a coffee stand (which it’s also located for you), says Nokia CTO Tero Ojanpera. And all this by 2010, too.

Heady stuff. Didn’t realize that device convergence would usurp the latte-ordering function of human beings, too.

Here I am at the Nokia World event, surrounded by all sorts of fantastic new technologies and devices showing the leading edge of mobile technology — but somewhere between Rafe of All About Symbian and I, there’s an SMS breakdown. He gets messages from my American SIM and account, but somehow messages he sends from his UK account disappear in the ether.

So for all the grand talk about where the industry is going and all these new products it’s delivering, let’s not forget about the small, basic things. It’s great that I’ve got a phone that can do so many things. But right now, all I want it to do is to deliver Rafe’s SMS to me. Having mobile TV or whatever other new service is fantastic, but all the new services in the world won’t make people overlook basic problems like faulty SMS interconnects.

Russell’s usually got much more clever titles for these things than me, but oh well. Anyhow, the MobHappy European tour continues this week, as I’m awaiting a flight to Amsterdam for the Nokia World event, where I’ll be contributing to a group blog about the event as well as posting some stuff here at MobHappy. If you’re around, drop me a line.

This week’s Carnival of the Mobilists is at Eli Dickenson’s Fierce Developer. Check it out for the usual collection of perceptive, witty and altogether, froody writing about mobile in the last week.

I have a bit of a busy week ahead, but if anyone is attending any of these events that I’m speaking at, make sure you come and say hello:

Wednesday I’m at Visiongain’s Mobile Advertising Conference 2006 speaking on “Advertising on the mobile web”.

Thursday sees me at Library House’s MediaTech with a dual role. I’ll be speaking in the morning about “MobileWeb 2.006: hype or happening?” Then doing sessions as part of the “Meet the Bloggers” experiment. Basically, attendees can meet a bunch of bloggers attending the conference and who will also be contributing to the wrap up at the end.

Friday is Digital Hollywood Europe, where I’ll be doing a panel “Advertising NEXT: Mobile, Social Nets, Blogs, Pods, IMs, and Broadband - It’s the Breakthrough Year!”

Look forward to seeing you at one or all the events.

There’s a number of myths about mobile, so this post may well turn into a series - if there’s a myth you’d like to bust, perhaps you’d like to leave a comment.

However, I was put in mind of one of the most prevalent and enduring myths by a post over at Ewan’s incredibly prolific, if maybe tautologous, SMS Text News. Apparently, 35% of US young adults say “they’ve read or sent an e-mail or text message under the dinner table during a holiday family gathering”.

The myth in this case is that it’s hard to input text into a mobile phone. It may well be for you (and it certainly is for me, though my fingers nearly fly over the qwerty keyboard on my Nokia E61). But to anyone who has actually grown up with a phone, that’s simply not the case.

These Digital Natives, really can input text for an sms or email, under the table, in the dark - without looking. And I think if you polled kids in Europe, the percentage would be even higher, as sms has been mainstream for that much longer.

So if you’re thinking about launching a mobile website, as an example, and you’re agonizing over a URL that’s “easy” to input on the mobile - really, don’t worry. It’s about as important as whether Santa gets gored to death by Rudolf this Christmas.

My other favourite myth is that while people demand free stuff on the web, they’re happy to pay through the nose for the same service or content on their mobile. To those people who believe that - don’t worry, I was only joking about Santa and Rudolf. Of course they’ll be bringing your Crimbo stocking stuffed full of goodies this year.

Image via Flickr

MH pal Daniel Taylor of the Mobile Enterprise Alliance made an interesting and eloquent response to Russell’s earlier post on mobile web stats, and we thought it was worth pulling out and highlighting on its own. Daniel’s made some minor changes and kindly allowed us to reprint it as a post. Take it away, Daniel:

In a market dominated by supply-side business models, few parties have a vested interest in acknowledging how fragmented the market is and how slow it’s actually growing. For MDA to publish detailed statistics would force the entire industry to very publicly ask the question of what everyone is doing wrong.

Of course, on the pages of weblogs like this one, we have a very public ongoing debate about the rifts between licensing agreements, data tariffs, technologies and user interfaces.

And the research firms are producing reports outlining actual uptake. Last year, Gartner Group found that 3/4 (or more) of users with Wi-Fi devices don’t actually use Wi-Fi while traveling. Recently, In-Stat found that even though the smartphone sales are increasing, IT departments are unaware that Java applications can run on (lesser) regular mobile telephones, and users still carry a second mobile for voice calls.

Findings like these are both stunning and disappointing, indicating industry-wide failures in product definition and service introduction. We have failed to understand both market and product requirements, and we still don’t understand what users actually want. The reasons for this are myriad, and there is plenty of blame to go around.

I prefer to identify the over-MBA-ification of the business world which applies an ever-reductionist set of analytical models to virtually every decision to the point where every business decision is simultaneously logical, considered, analyzed and meaningless. This abstracted, cool and rational decision making results in a few innovations and a large swath of horribly-misguided products and services. It gives us mobile browsers that don’t work. It gives us soft buttons that keep taking us to services not worth paying for. And it gives us an ongoing love-hate relationship with devices and wireless operators.

From a business IT perspective, mobile data is a disaster, and organizations like MDA are ill-suited to address this topic head on. The reason is simple, membership organizations are designed to serve classes of members, and it takes managerial vision to gain support and develop sufficient budgets to actively involve the so-called “user” community. MDA membership is currently restricted to the vendor community.

I believe strongly in the MDA mission, and I applaud their efforts to date. And yet it is a mistake for MDA management to continue to sweep the disappointing results under the proverbial rug. This topic requires a meaningful and controversial debate about where the market is and what we need to do next. The standard approach of “closing the ranks” most likely keeps the vendors happy and the membership dues incoming. But in today’s electronic online dialogue, we need more than that. We have the ability to talk about “challenges,” “opportunities,” and places for “improvement.” Without pointing fingers, we can address the underlying question of why the market remains fragmented and poorly defined. Failure to do so will continue to quash virtually all legitimacy with the supposed “user” groups the organization purports to encourage and represent.

The Mobile Data Association has announced the latest quarterly stats for mobile web usage. And, to be honest, they’re really disappointing.

Why? Well, they’re meaningless.

The main issue is that (like many such stats) they make no distinction between downloads and browsing, which is a big difference in user behaviour.

Secondly, the headline of 40.7 million users in the quarter might be true, but it overstates usage considerably. What it actually means is that 13 million people used the mobile web in July, 13.7 million August and 14 million in September. In other words, it’s almost certainly the same people using it each month, albeit with healthy month on month growth.

The MDA is an organisation consisting of industry players to promote the cause of mobile data usage, especially among users. This is a laudable aim and one which we should encourage. But this aim isn’t best served by guarding the real stats, when clearly their members have access to everything the rest of us need to know.

As an example, we’re currently poised on the cusp of a massive explosion of brands building mobile websites (or at least adapting content for mobile). If I’m a marketing director of a big brand right now, I’d want to know if it’s worth the investment and resources and some of the questions I need answers for are:

* What percentage of the mobile owning population browse the web with their phones (as opposed to downloading - a very different experience and mindset)?

* What percentage use on-portal v off-portal?

* How big is on-portal and off-portal? Which is growing? How quickly?

* What are the top 10/50/100 mobile websites by traffic? The MDA does list the “Top 10″ here, but it’s clearly anecdotal and random and if you know anything about it, just about as misleading a Top 10 as it can be.

* What kind of sites are most popular?

* Demographic breakdown of users

That’s probably the minimum I’d expect my advisors to be able to tell me and even then I’d probably have a lot more questions.

The MDA in theory has answers to all these questions, or more accurately, its members do. So why the reluctance to provide those who need it a proper business case for signing up to the mobile web? After all, the more sites, the more promotion, the more consumers surfing, the more money the MDA membership makes.

I suspect the answer is that although full of the best intentions, like many trade bodies, they’re frustrated by lack of resources and the politics of the membership. Bear in mind that if they want to provide answers to all these questions, all the operators have to agree to provide all the data and then actually provide it. Herding cats would be easy in comparison.

It’s a great shame though that the membership can’t get its act together and provide a consistent voice and the information people need to make decisions that will end up directly benefiting….the membership. I mean supposing you went to buy a car and the salesperson refused to tell you miles per gallon or what colour it came in, for confidential reasons?

Don’t get me wrong, the MDA has done some great work over the years - promoting sms, for example. What I’d like is more support for the work they’re trying to do and let them get on with doing the job.

This time last year, I reviewed a mobile based shopping application - Reporo. On a visit to London last week, it was interesting to catch up with the company and see how they’d fared in the last year.

In my original review, my main concern was how much of a demand there was for mobile-based shopping right now. Indeed, is the whole concept of a virtual mobile shopping mall flawed - counter-intuitive though that might be?

One year on and the team have come to pretty much the same conclusion. While shopping is certainly still an important part of the proposition (and rightly so), this isn’t what’s driving the initial downloads and subsequent volume usage - it’s messaging.

Reporo now offers free text and picture messaging, as well as free IM from within its free downloadable Java application. Users still have to pay data charges from their operator - though I hope that phrase will seem quaintly old fashioned, as surely we must see fixed priced plans taking off soon. The example on their website is that a bundle of 500 texts normally costs $10 - $30, but with Reporo costs about $2. Unless, of course, you are lucky enough to have a fixed data plan, but let’s not bang on about it shall we?

This focus on messaging puts Report into Hotxt territory (or vice versa), who I wrote about last week and it’s clearly a fast-growth area right now, with other players starting to emerge too. The key difference between the services currently is that Reporo is taking more of a portal strategy, bundling other services along with the messaging, such as the original shopping idea and news, sports and information.

At this stage, it’s hard to tell if the focused approach, like Hotxt, is the right strategy, or Reporo’s more “all things to all men” execution will win out. What normally works in these types of uncharted waters is constant and determined experimentation, with the best ideas incorporated and the worst ruthlessly dumped overboard. The downside of this approach though is that users get confused with exactly what you do and stand for, so it’s a fine line to tread.

Being a downloadable Java application, Reporo is blisteringly fast to use and navigate, putting 3G speeds to shame. It’s much more akin to using a broadband connection on your phone, from a user experience point of view and the navigation is well thought out and intuitive.

As connection speeds improve, we’ll see if this Java strategy is an interim one, or if services like Reporo would do better to move on to the mobile web. But for now, it feels much better as a download.

The downside of Java, as we’ve noted bitterly many times before, is all the work required porting it across all makes and models of handsets. This makes it an expensive and frustrating application to run, or forces you to be very selective about which models of handsets you support. Reporo have started off with MIDP 2.0 Nokia and Sony Ericsson and plan to launch others in due course, as they ramp up.

So, go on, give Reporo a try if you’re following mobile apps (and you’re in the wrong place if you’re not). Register here and download wherever you are. It’s a nice example of a clean, well-executed Java portal, albeit focused around a service offering, rather than the more common content proposition.

For a long time, it was pretty easy to poke holes in (and fun of) Hutchison’s 3G operator, 3. From the way Hutch MD Canning Fok conducted interviews, to its bone-headed insistence that video calls would lead users in droves to 3G, to its later shift to attract user by slashing the cost of the most 2G application of all — voice calls. The defining moment, really, was when their UK COO said that people that want open internet access on their mobile phones must be “nuts”.

All that stuff colored my judgment of the company. They’ve gone and done some cool stuff (at least in the UK) since, like their user-generated video service, SeeMeTV, which has proven quite popular, as has Kink Kommunity, their social-networking service, and they also offer free access to Windows Live Messenger, SMS revenue losses be damned. But there’s still some rough spots, in particular a lack of open internet access — so perhaps although that COO left, his influence remains.

But now I’m feeling really conflicted after checking out their X-Series services, which were announced today. In short, they’ve put together a bunch of internet services (Skype, Sling, Orb, Windows Live Messenger, Google, eBay, Yahoo) and will give them to their users for a flat fee. They haven’t announced pricing details, but when you read something like this from an operator, you can’t help but get your hopes up:

Why should you pay per minute, per message, per click, per megabit? In the real world, you buy your PC, pay for broadband and that’s it. Our principle is simple – X-Series customers will only pay a flat access fee on top of their basic subscription and then what’s free to use on the internet should be free to use on mobile broadband (subject to fair usage and international roaming conditions, of course).

I’m not really sure what to say about that, since rarely do operators speak so sensibly. Dean Bubley, who’s just as cynical about operators as I am, calls this “beautiful heresy”, since 3 is embracing all those things that other operators view as nightmares: flat-rate data, free IM, placeshifting of media from other content sources, and so on. They’re adding value in optimizing them for their customers, and should be able to justify a premium price over flat-rate data plans like T-Mobile’s £7.50 per month Web’n'Walk offering. Operators worry all the time about becoming dumb pipes that provide only connectivity; 3 is illustrating how they can be a smart pipe.

One further note, that’s a bit of an aside, really: the Skype client isn’t really VoIP — they’re using iSkoot, as I suspected back in August. But it doesn’t matter: 3’s implementation still delivers most of the benefits of Skype, like free Skype-to-Skype calls and presence information.