The complexity of modern mobile phones is leaving users frustrated and angry, research suggests.

Some 61% of those interviewed in the UK and US said setting up a new handset is as challenging as moving bank accounts.

Compiled by mobile firm Mformation, the survey found 85% of users reporting they were frustrated by the difficulty of getting a new phone up and working.

Of the 4,000 people questioned, 95% said they would try more new services if phones were easier to set up.

As I said, not too surprising. But “setting up a new handset is as challenging as moving bank accounts” — is moving bank accounts really the bar by which you’d want the usability of your service/device to be measured? Yeesh.

Russell’s been banging the “Microsoft’s about to screw up mobile something fierce” drum for a bit. Windows Mobile is looking about as a good a bet for the future of mobile as Palm at this point, while I’m hard pressed to think of any mobile services that MS has really got going for it at this point.

Of course, this is from the company that thought buying Yahoo would be a good strategy to get ahead of Google…

Communities Dominate Brands: SMS text messaging worth 100 B dollars in 2007:

Now its clear this year we will pass the 100 billion dollar mark… How big is that? Take all of hollywood movie box office revenues worldwide. Add all of the global music industry revenues. And add all of videogaming revenues around the world. Even all those three together, we don’t reach 100 billion.

So I quickly thought of him when I saw a post today about some new research proclaiming that global messaging revenues are some five times higher than global movie box office receipts. For the numerically inclined, mobile messaging will be worth $130 billion worldwide this year, compared to about $27 billion for movies.

As we say here in Vegas, “dayum”. And remember, you heard it from Tomi first.

GPS Phones Surpass Standalone Devices:

More GPS-enabled handsets will ship this year than standalone navigation devices, IMS Research said today.

Take that, separatistas!

Text messaging remains the most widely used data application in the UK, with 2007 revenues nearly three times the figures for data revenue. Regulator Ofcom revealed in its hefty annual survey of the communications market published today that SMS revenue for 2007 was £2.7 billion pounds, compared with £1 billion for data revenues and £11.4 billion for voice.

Good roundup from MocoNews on UK regulator Ofcom’s latest survey of the telecom market (full report here). In short, SMS continues to boom, up a third in 2007, with people sending an average of 67 messages per month. Meanwhile, 44 percent of British adults text daily, as opposed to just 36 percent that use the internet each day, and just 25 percent never use SMS, while 28 percent never use the internet.

But what about the mobile internet? Ofcom says on one of the survey’s summary pages that “More than one in ten mobile phone users have accessed the internet on their mobile phone”. The report later cites data saying that just 5 percent of internet users age 15 and above used the internet on a “portable device” in Q108, unchanged from the previous year. It also says that there were 12.5 million 3G subscriptions at the end of 2007, or about 17 percent of all 74 million mobile subs (note that’s serving a population of 60 million). One big point that Ofcom emphasized was the takeoff of mobile broadband dongles — it claims 2 million UK adults said they’d “used a data card, USB modem or dongle to access the internet in March 2008″.

But take all these stats with a grain of salt: back in June, the MDA said 16.5 million people in the UK used the mobile internet in May. Who to believe? Anyway, there’s plenty of stats to pour over in the full report if you’re interested.

Second, big kudos to Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOM, who points out that less than a year ago, ABI said that 31% of smartphones would be running Linux in 2012. What to make of that change, that 25.8% decrease in market share estimates?

Not sure what the explanation is, but that’s a pretty hefty change. Also, if all the various flavors of mobile Linux — Android, LiMo, Palm, etc — are going to be different enough so as to be incompatible, is there any value in lumping them all together as one cohesive mobile Linux group?

U.S. purchases of new cellphones declined in the first quarter for the first time in several years, signaling that worries about an economic slowdown are hurting the handset market, according to two new studies.

The drop was concentrated among poorer customers using prepaid plans and among households earning $75,000 to $99,000 a year. The upper end of the cellphone market — phones featuring full keyboards for email and text messaging, and extra features for music downloads and video viewing — continued to see growth.

The dip doesn’t seem too surprising, given the belt-tightening that a lot of people are doing, along with the market continuing towards saturation (the WSJ says mobile penetration is at 83% in the US now). But check out what the story says about high-end devices and how their sales are up.

So, is it a tale of economic malaise, or are US consumers just tired of the crappy selection of handsets most operators here offer? The slowing economy is a convenient excuse for any business seeing slowing sales — but it’s also a smokescreen covering up plenty of other ills.

16% of US homes are mobile-only (but this being the US, cable connections are usually considered separately and not considered ‘fixed’ lines). This number has been increasing consistently.

[snip]

Oh, and I love the statistic that wireless-only users are more than twice as likely to binge-drink than landline customers. Now if only someone had an explanation for cause-and-effect here…. does dealing with mobile customer service agents drive you to drink? Or do people cancel their landline subscription when they’re drunk, and wake up in the morning wondering what happened to their dialtone?

I guess that’s the sort of thing you find out when the Centers For Disease Control start doing surveys about phones.

According to a recent report from Juniper Research, the global market for Mobile Web 2.0 could be worth as much as $22.4 billion by 2013, up from its current figure of $5.5 billion. The research firm says that among social networking, user generated content, mobile search and mobile IM, Mobile Web 2.0 “provides a framework for delivery of collaborative applications,” further enhanced by location-based services.

1. What is mobile web 2.0? To that end, can we even agree on what mobile web 1.0 is?

2. How is it already worth $5.5 billion per year? Any mobile web companies out there that can vouch they’ve received their share of this?

Informa’s got some other interesting stats: at the end of September, 59 countries had penetration of more than 100 percent; just 27 countries had penetration under 10 percent.

The highest ARPU in the world is enjoyed by MTC in Kuwait, at $71 per month. It’s followed by 3UK, who despite rampant criticism over the years, brings in $70.55. The low end of the scale comes from Hutchison in Sri Lanka, with an ARPU of $2.83 per month, followed by operators in Bangladesh, the Ukraine and Pakistan.

These stats and figures reflect the wide array of challenges faced by the mobile industry worldwide. In developed nations, the goal is to boost ARPU, primarily with data and other services; in developing nations, it’s boosting penetration and turning a profit on extremely low ARPU. Some 3 billion or so people in the world are covered by mobile networks, but don’t have mobile phones, underscoring the importance of emerging markets to handset vendors.