Our good friend Rudy de Waele has the latest edition of the Carnival of the Mobilists up at his m-trends.org site. He’s got a roundup of the best blogging about mobile from last week, so be sure and check it out!

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App stores abound these days: Apple’s well-known effort has been joined by BlackBerry’s App World, and more recently, Nokia’s Ovi Store, while pretty much every operator, handset vendor and used-car dealer has said they’re going to set up their own shop. A lot of this is based on the huge number of downloads by iPhone users, and the misperception that all those downloads equal easy riches.

Granted, the revenue path is better in the Apple store than others (assuming you can get your app approved by the great gatekeeper), but it remains that fewer developers are really raking it in than many people would believe.

This is largely because although Apple, and to some extent, the other players, have solved the distribution issue, but they haven’t cracked the discovery nut. Maybe browsing is a little easier on the iPhone, with its large display and easy scrolling, but that’s not exactly a solution. Browsing in the Ovi Store was so bad that I haven’t been back since I played with it at launch. And the problem of “Top Downloads” and “Most Popular” lists remains exactly the same: once apps get on those lists, it’s difficult to get them off.

It’s important for developers to realize/remember/remind themselves that app stores are just distribution channels — not marketing strategies. It’s no different than any other product scenario: getting that product in a distribution channel alone isn’t enough to generate and drive sales. People see stories like the guy who’s made a lot of money with an iPhone birdwatching app, but fail to read far enough to realize that he only got the big boost after his app got featured in an Apple TV ad.

So for developers: get your app in the various stores, and make sure users can find them easily with the search function in each one. Then get your marketing efforts going. You deal with fragmentation of the stores by being in all of them, and push users with “search for it in your app store”.

The takeaway for app store providers: get the distribution right, but if you really want to drive downloads and developer success, do it not only with the usual suspects like revenue-sharing levels, but give them some real marketing help, too.

Update: See this post over at GigaOM for some good insight into the long tail of iPhone apps, courtesy of AdMob data (AdMob being a great way to both publicize and monetize your apps, right Russell? ):

I suspect the success of a particular app relies on one of three things:

* You are already a huge, successful company, expanding on an existing product. See: AIM, Facebook, ESPN.
* Apple decides your app is worth promoting on the front page of the App Store.
* Your app is really good, and all your users rave to their friends about it.

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The good folks over at VentureBeat are holding their second MobileBeat event in San Francisco on July 16. I’ve been part of their illustrious board of advisors, so I can say that the speakers and topics they’ve lined up are top-notch, and it should be a great event. As a part of it, they’re hosting a startup competition, giving new companies a chance to get some great exposure in front of the crowd and on VentureBeat.

If you’re interested, be sure to enter by June 30. The entrants will be narrowed down to a list of 50, and then VentureBeat readers will vote on the final 14 to present at the event, and two winners will be picked by a panel of expert judges. So if you’ve got a startup, get yourself entered… and if you’ll be in the area on July 16, get yourself registered to attend.

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The team over at Skyfire have today released version 1.0 of their browser, bringing it out of beta. Skyfire is a “full” browser, like the well-known Opera Mini, but it’s even “fuller” — it can handle Flash 10, Silverlight, AJAX and Quicktime, meaning you can watch videos on YouTube and Hulu, and get the full versions of other sites. Pretty nifty.

Skyfire’s currently available for Windows Mobile and Nokia smartphones, but they’ve also announced they’ll be tackling BlackBerry next. What’s more, they say they also had a million downloads during their beta period, so congrats for that.

Download the app from get.skyfire.com.

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There are a couple of great events coming up that are worth checking out. First, on June 3 at Java One in San Francisco, our pals at WIP are holding another one of their WIP Jam Sessions. If you’re a mobile developer and will be in the area, definitely hit this one up. It’s free, and full of great discussions and contacts.

Next up is the latest Mobile 2.0 Europe event on June 18 and 19 in Barcelona. Not that you should really need much inducement to visit Barcelona, but Rudy de Waele and co. have put together a tremendous list of speakers, and they’ve also added a developer day that looks good.

Rudy also adds another good reason to come is to “Come and see the new Champions League cup in Camp Nou of F.C. Barcelona.” We can only hope, Rudy

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I’ve been carrying a Nokia E71 for several months now, but I swapped back to my N82 briefly a little while back when I wanted to use its far superior camera (best-ever camera on a phone IMO). The biggest change was having to use predictive text again — and that wasn’t something I enjoyed too much, having gotten used to the QWERTY goodness of the E71. I’d have a really hard time going back to a standard keypad at this point, and I’m not sure I’d want to.

AT&T’s CMO says that what it’s labelled “quick-messaging phones” — feature phones with QWERTY keyboards — will “usurp the feature phone”. We’re certainly seeing more and more of them here in the US, across all the operators. But from my view, I’m not sure I see them “usurping” featurephones so much as hampering Blackberry’s consumer push, and perhaps some of the growth of smartphones. I’ve felt for a long time the main attraction of Blackberry and other QWERTY smartphones to the consumer market wasn’t push email, but rather the keyboard, and how much easier it makes texting and IM.

Further, I don’t think that adding QWERTY keyboards to devices means the feature phone is dying, it’s simply evolving, as you’d expect it to. The feature phone market, or at least the non-smartphone market, still has a lot of life left in it, and increasingly, the smartphone/feature phone distinction will become less and less important.

If you’ve swapped back and/or forth between QWERTY and non-QWERTY devices, I’d love to hear about your experience and your thoughts in the comments. Are devices with standard keypads on their way out?

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There’s been lots of talk about the bright future for ad-supported, versus paid, mobile content. I’m generally pretty bullish on the idea — if it’s done correctly. A big point to consider is the balance between content and advertising, and making sure that you’re not overwhelming your customers with too many ads, outweighing the value of the content you’re giving them, or making it too difficult for users to actually get the content.

What spurred this was seeing a post over at Symbian-Guru about a software company that’s made its whole catalog “free.” To get the “free” content, users have to earn credits by viewing ads — and the ads are prompted by phone events like ending a call or getting an SMS (heh, brings to mind something like: “This hangup was brought to you by Coke! Have a Coke, a smile, and shut the hell up!”). Ricky from Symbian-Guru says he didn’t find the ads too intrusive, but personally, I feel like having common phone events generate ads would bother me.

Another example comes from US operator Cricket, which recently launched its Myperks program. Users can sign up for it and get content delivered to their idle screen, along with ads and coupons. This sort of thing’s been mulled over for a long time, and lots of people seem to feel like a phone’s idle screen is fair game for ads mixed in with some content. Again, I’m not so sure, both personally, but also because the ads don’t take any sort of context into consideration.

What do you think? How best should content providers balance this? Do these examples go too far?

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this one is going to stretch back several weeks, but enjoy anyway:

- Get an SMS… from your lawnmower
- iPhone Web Usage Continues to Rise — Even On T-Mobile’s Network
- Mobile phones turning “surveillance society” on its head?
- RIM CEO on BlackBerry Storm: “nobody gets it perfect out the door”
- This is really, really cool: Nokia Life Tools help Indian farmers get one
- This fits well with the above link: IBM India Creates Voice-Driven Sites Via Mobile Phones
- Nokia Intrigue filtering into Verizon stores, features weird ‘Habitat Mode’
- MetroPCS mimics landline with family `groupline’
- http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2009/04/apple-stanford.html
- And, finally: Former Gizmondo chief Stefan Eriksson lands back in jail, in Sweden. Thank you, Stefan, you just keep on giving!

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My foibles with the camera in my Nokia E71 are well documented. Given its limitations, I swapped it for a Nokia N82 when I went and saw The Killers break in a new venue here in Las Vegas last weekend. Great show, I definitely recommend seeing the band if they come to a town near you.

Anyway, lots of people there taking pictures and shooting video with their handsets, as usual. But lots of them were going to be disappointed with that part of the experience, as there were plenty of flashes firing from the back of the hall, jittery video, and, as I discovered, the sound was just too damn loud, overwhelming the mic and rendering the audio unlistenable (turn your speakers WAY down before clicking that link).

Obviously the hardware in use here isn’t perfect for this sort of thing, but could there be a better software solution? Detecting tons of noise and adjusting the mic level would help, for one! But perhaps instead of trying to mimic digital camera interfaces and settings, more scenario-driven settings modes, like, say “Concert Mode”, that reflect the times people use their handsets’ cameras, might help. Of course, you’d still have to get people to select those modes, but maybe it’s a start.

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Keep that in mind the next time somebody tells you people don’t like to download apps on their phone.

And remember Buckley’s Law #31:

Citizens will download applications, providing it’s very clear what the application does and what the benefits of using it are.

As well as its corollary, Longino Revised Statute 31.31/b:

Citizens will download applications, provided it’s truly easy, fast, and rewarding.

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