Author: Tricia Duryee

Nokia (NYSE: NOK) is still reeling from having to delay its latest smartphones based on concerns that the latest Symbian platform is not ready for prime time.

But that didn’t stop the Finnish handset-maker from unveiling the specs for the first phone, which is now due about three months late and will ship in the third quarter of this year. The phone, which will be available in select markets, will cost $493 (Euro 370).

The smartphone packages together some of the highest end hardware components with some of Nokia’s typical content and services, such as an app store, social networking and navigation.

The phone has a 12 megapixel camera with Nokia’s signature Carl Zeiss lens with a flash and a large sensor (found in compact digital cameras). The camera also comes HD-ready, so that videos can be shot and watched in high definition. The phone also comes preloaded with links to videos from media companies, such as CNN, E! Entertainment, Paramount and National Geographic. Users will be able to download additional content and applications for Nokia’s Ovi Store.

While the Symbian^3 OS has been delayed, Nokia still trumpeted the platform’s attributes, including support for multi-tasking, multi-touch, pinch-zooming and the ability to personalize multiple homescreens with apps and widgets. The OS is expected to provide a badly needed update to Nokia’s previous user interface, which was considered slow and not very easy to use. So far, in early glimpses of the UI, it largely looks the same, so the key will be in performance enhancements.

Related

• Nokia Slashes Prices After Delaying New Smartphone OS
• Nokia Sales Up, But Symbian Delay Blunts iPhone Counter-Attack

Mobile payment provider Zong of Palo Alto, Calif. has spun off from its Swiss parent Echovox and has raised $15 million to help pay for its rapid growth, which includes expanding into as many as two countries per month. The second round of capital was led by Matrix Partners.

The company continues to aggressively pursue carrier partnerships so that it has access to even more subscribers, who in turn, can use their mobile phone bills to make virtual good purchases online in social networks or in gaming environments.

Zong is perhaps best known for being the mobile payment provider for Facebook Credits, the virtual currency platform being deployed on the social network. Zong will have to move quickly as it faces steep competition for other well-funded venture that see mobile payments that investors—such as Matrix—are describing as the next PayPal-like opportunity.

Other companies in the space include PayPal, San Francisco-based Boku, which recently raised $25 million, and Paris-based Hi-media, a publicly held company that is bringing its payments platform to the U.S. Zong’s CEO David Marcus said in an interview that Zong currently has 60 employees and will ramp up quickly to 100.

The funding and spinoff mean Zong is now an independent company despite being started by Echovox back in 2008. As part of the investment, Dana Stalder, Matrix’s general partner, will join Zong’s board of directors. Stalder, who worked previously at PayPal, said “Zong clearly has all the attributes to build an industry-leading payment platform.” He said merchants in particular like the service because it increases check-out rates five to ten times better than a bank card, and enables consumers who don’t have credit card to participate in the virtual good economy.

The blog consolidation continues with Mail.com Media’s acquisition of The Boy Genius Report, a top-visited mobile site known for digging up big scoops—while also remaining mysteriously hush-hush about the website owner’s identity.

Along with the sale, Boy Genius revealed his name and story on how he got here: Jonathan Geller, an early-20s gadget fanatic, who owned his first cellphone at at 10, began writing for Engadget at 17 and started his own site back in 2006. Since then, he’s built a mini-media empire that gets roughly one million page views a month and is considered one of the top 50 most influential content sites across all categories.

Mail.com Media has a network of media sites, including Nikki Finke’s Deadline.com, HollywoodLife.com and Movieline.com. Geller will continue as President, Editor-in-Chief, and General Manager of BGR, and will work directly with Mail.com’s Owner Jay Penske. The site’s name will be simplified to BGR.com. In keeping with tradition, Geller has kept one thing off the record: How much Mail.com paid for the site.

In a blog post this evening, Geller details his run-up to success: “As I write this, BGR is, according to Technorati, ranked #49 out of every single site in the world. When I think back about how this was accomplished, and how with just a few great writers, and practically no infrastructure, we built something pretty mind blowing…”

Ground Truth has raised $7 million in a second round of financing after coming out of stealth mode in January.

The Seattle-based company collects data from carriers and other infrastructure companies to see the real traffic logs of the mobile internet, and then sells that data to operators, advertisers, publishers and others. By using a large sample size, the company hopes to have more accurate figures than previously available through other sources, such as surveys and monitoring services.

New investors in the round include Emergence Capital Partners and OPENAIR Ventures. Other participants include Steamboat Ventures and Voyager Capital. The company has now raised a total of $9.6 million.

Related

• Ground Truth Lifts Veil Of Secrecy In Mobile By Mining Carrier Data

The iPhone prototype story that has stolen the headlines for the past week-or-so still won’t stop.

Now, Gizmodo reports that as of Friday night, California police entered the home of Gizmodo Editor Jason Chen and seized four computers and two servers, despite the publication’s lawyer warning that a raid would be not be legal in light of both state and federal laws that prevent law officials from confiscating property of a journalist. But whether police officials feel comfortable examining the evidence is unclear, reports TechCrunch, which said the investigation is on hold while the district attorney evaluates whether the Shield Law protects Chen’s possessions.

To be sure, the case is unusual. Gizmodo paid $5,000 for what may have been a stolen next-generation iPhone. The story captivated paidContent’s State of the Gadget Media event last week. During the panel discussion, Gizmodo’s publisher and head of Gawker Media Nick Denton said he did not regret a thing, while an editor from CNET said if given the opportunity, he wouldn’t pay for the phone “to incentivize criminality.” MacRumors also said it wouldn’t pay for the story, but would have run a story.

With not much precedent for a case, many are wondering if this will be the first major test to see if bloggers have the same protections as traditional journalists. Gizmodo is definitely positioning the case that way. Its lawyer wrote in a letter to the police: “Jason is a journalist who works full time for our company…He works from home, which is his de facto newsroom, and all equipment used by him there is used for the purposes of his employment with us.” The strategy is wise, however, as techdirt points out, the Shield law protects journalists from revealing their sources—not from journalists committing crimes. This might come down to whether the iPhone, which was reportedly left in a bar, is considered stolen property or not.

Research In Motion’s stock went for a roller coaster ride today.

After losing 2.8 percent this morning, the company’s stock regained ground and is trading up nearly 3 percent to $72.70 a share after its co-CEO Mike Lazaridis said it is developing a touchscreen-friendly operating system—BlackBerry 6—that will be available by September.

The announcement puts to rest concerns that investors and analysts were having earlier in the day when the biggest news coming from RIM (NSDQ: RIMM) was that it was releasing an updated version of the BlackBerry Bold and Pearl—two popular, but older franchises. The smartphone-maker has been under fire to produce an updated operating system and browser that is more consumer friendly and comparable with the iPhone and Android phones.

Just hours earlier, investors and analysts were concerned the company wouldn’t deliver any updates, despite promises in its last earnings call that it was really excited about its upcoming phone line-up. To the contrary, new versions of the Pearl and Bold seemed to completely contradict that.

But this afternoon, Lazaridis calmed fears giving analysts a sneak peek at a revamped operating system during his keynote before RIM’s annual Wireless Enterprise Symposium event in Orlando this week. Based on early reports, analysts liked what they saw. Mackie Research Capital analyst Nick Agostino said in an email to Reuters that the audience was quiet during the demonstration and then broke into applause. He characterized the presentation as “Shock and awe.” According to MarketWatch, Matt Thornton of Avian Securities wrote in an e-mail, “It is much more modern, web 2.0 oriented….on par with Android, iPhone, WebOS.”

The OS will be rolled out to all the devices over time, including a lot of existing BlackBerry smartphone users, and will be initially available sometime between July and September. The OS will also include a more user-friendly browser that is capable of rendering full web sites better than the BlackBerry browser available today.

Motricity, which is in the increasingly tough business of providing back-end infrastructure to U.S. wireless carriers, lost $1.5 million on revenues of $29.1 million in the first quarter 2010, according to an SEC filing.

The Bellevue, Wash.-based company, which filed its registration papers back in January and is seeking $250 million in a public offering, reported that revenues increased by almost 25 percent compared to the same period a year ago, while the company’s losses narrowed significantly to $1.5 million from $69.7 million.

Most of Motricity’s current business is focused helping carriers sell mobile content, such as ringtones, applications and other services, to its end-users. However, that business is increasingly at risk as customers go directly to the web for content, or download applications from third-parties. In March, Motricity announced a three-part overhaul of its carrier offerings that attempts to bring them—and their customers—up to speed in the areas of applications, advertising and social networking. The company did not mention these new services in the filing, likely because they are too new to register any revenues.

Despite these overall trends, Motricity said storefront revenues continue to rise. In the first quarter, the company said managed service revenues increased $700,000, or 3.3 percent to $20.9 million. However, the amount of revenues obtained on a per transaction fell because one of its carriers converted a contract to a fixed fee arrangement. In the first quarter, user-based fees made up about 52 percent of revenues vs. 76 percent in the year-ago period. In addition, the average monthly number of users on the company’s “non-messaging based solutions” decreased to 34.4 million from 34.5 million in the comparable period of 2009.

Related

• Motricity Plays Catch-Up: Rolls Out App Stores For Carriers
• Motricity Updates IPO Filing: 2009 Revenues Up, Losses Improve
• Motricity Files For $250 Million Public Offering
• The Man Behind Motricity’s $250 Million IPO & His Incentives

Yahoo and Samsung have extended a three-year-old partnership that will bring the internet search provider’s content to millions of Samsung handsets running both its homegrown bada operating system and Google’s Android.

The deal is not exclusive, but if Samsung decides to, it could do something as extreme as replacing Google (NSDQ: GOOG) search on Android devices with Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO). Previously, Yahoo was providing a limited number of applications to Samsung, including Go, Flickr and Finance, to lower-end handsets. This new agreement expands to more countries, more devices and more Yahoo services.

Samsung will now pre-load a number of Yahoo services on to its handsets, including Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Front Page, Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! Flickr, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Contacts, Yahoo! Calendar, and Yahoo! Weather on a global basis starting in May.

Yahoo’s partnership with Samsung comes at a confusing time in the wireless industry, where carriers, handset makers and operating systems are all forming conflicting search deals that clash with one another. In recent months, AT&T (NYSE: T) replaced Google search with Yahoo on an Android device to comply with a search deal it has with Yahoo. In addition, T-Mobile USA recently ended its multi-year contract with Yahoo to begin a new one with Google.

Imagine a confusing scenario in which Samsung makes an Android phone with Yahoo services for Verizon Wireless, which has an exclusive deal with Microsoft’s Bing. While these partnerships are still being signed, their importance is definitely being diminished—end-users can easily bypass pre-loaded applications by downloading applications from the competition in open marketplaces, or by going to a web site from within the browser.

Related

• T-Mobile USA Says They Ditched Yahoo For Google Because Consumers Demanded It
• Yahoo Disbands Mobile Group As Part Of Reorganization
• Yahoo Loses Exclusive T-Mobile USA Search Deal To Google
• AT&T Strips Google’s Search Off Android; Will Verizon Or T-Mobile Follow?

Nokia (NYSE: NOK) said yesterday it was delaying the release of new smartphones loaded with the latest Symbian operating system to the third quarter because it was not meeting quality requirements.

Now the handset-maker is also slashing prices of its cellphones with some smartphones being discounted by as much as 10 percent, reports Reuters.

The delay comes at the wrong time. Already, the largest handset maker in the world has had a hard time competing against other smartphone makers, such as Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), RIM (NSDQ: RIMM), or manufacturers developing phones based on Google’s Android. The company has already been forced to drop prices. In the first quarter, it charged on average 155 euros for a smartphone, down from 190 euros in the third quarter—or much lower than Apple’s average selling price of $622 per iPhone.

Nokia’s smartphone shipments are also not growing as fast as others. It said during the first quarter, smartphone sales jumped 50 percent compared to the same period a year. During the same time period, for comparison, Apple saw iPhone sales jump by 131 percent.

The latest phones, based on the updated Symbian operating systems, will now be announced sometime before June, and rolled out in the third quarter. The update is expected to improve the user interface, which up until now has been criticized as offering a clunky experience. Carolina Milanesi, an Egham, U.K.-based analyst at Gartner told Bloomberg that Nokia’s smartphone reputation is suffering: “Unfortunately it’s not Mercedes-Benz or BMW that I think of when I think of them today. Ford is what comes to mind. Reliable, not expensive, and I get a bit more than I paid for.”

Related

• Nokia Sales Up, But Symbian Delay Blunts iPhone Counter-Attack

An official police investigation has been opened to determine whether Gizmodo’s purchase of what could be an iPhone prototype violated any criminal laws.

CNet reports that according to officials, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) has spoken to local police about the incident and the investigation is believed to be headed by a computer crime task force led by the district attorney’s office in Santa Clara County, where Apple’s headquarters are located.

While it’s possible the transaction violated laws, it is not clear whether the police are targeting Gizmodo, or the source who reportedly found the iPhone in a bar and sold it for $5,000—or both. Gizmodo returned the device to Apple after Apple acknowledged lost property was theirs.

On Wednesday, Nick Denton, publisher of Gizmodo, was asked at paidContent.org’s State of the Gadget Media event that given the potential legal ramifications would he do anything differently? His response was no, except one minor regret: He wished he had held back the identity of the Apple engineer, who lost the phone, for a few days and “milked the page views” even more.

Gizmodo’s publicity stunt did indeed juice page views. On the day the story was published, Gizmodo’s unique visitors shot up to 2 million from an average of about 500,000 a day, Denton said at the event.

The police investigation will try and determine whether there’s sufficient evidence to file criminal charges. Gizmodo has claimed that it had no idea that device was stolen when they bought it. When Apple asked for the device back, they wrote: “Now that we definitely know it’s not some knockoff, and it really is Apple’s, I’m happy to see it returned to its rightful owner.”

Under California law, if a person finds lost property and knows who the owner is but keeps it for their own use, he or she is guilty of theft. If the value of the property exceeds $400, grand theft charges can be filed. Separately, if any person knowingly receives property that has been obtained illegally, he or she can be imprisoned for up to one year. However, in the case of Gizmodo, they may be able to claim freedom of the press under the First Amendment, which says confidential information leaked to a news organization can be legally broadcast. It’s unclear if that changes if the material is purchased.

Related

• State Of Gadget Media: Gawker’s ‘Lost’ iPhone Story: Denton Would Do It Again
• Apple To Gizmodo: You’ve Had Your Fun, Hand Over The Phone

After emerging as one of the top buy-out candidates one week ago, Taiwanese handset maker HTC is reportedly now passing on the opportunity to buy Palm (NSDQ: PALM).

Reports now indicate that the leading candidate is Lenovo, however, there’s questions as to whether the computer-maker would want to spend more than half its cash on the fledgling company. With no firm offer on the table, pundits are grasping at other straws. How about Dell, HP, or Intel? (NSDQ: INTC) Maybe Nokia? (NYSE: NOK)

Now is the time for Palm, which reportedly hired investment bankers and put itself up for sale last week, to consider a back-up plan. Clearly, it hasn’t gotten a solid or realistic offer yet. As a publicly traded company, it would have to bring an offer to the board if one came along. Palm’s CEO Jon Rubinstein declined to confirm to MarketWatch yesterday whether the company is indeed being shopped around.

In the same MarketWatch interview yesterday, Rubinstein was bullish about the prospects of keeping Palm an independent company, and despite dwindling cash reserves, he said they had no plans to raise additional capital. “We’re planning on sticking around. We want to broaden our distribution and our footprint in Europe,” Rubinstein commented. “I think one of the things that investors should think about is that we provide real differentiation in a very crowded market.”

So, if all buy-out candidates fall through, what could Palm do? Palm could extend its distribution, increase revenues and marketing power if it considered licensing webOS to other hardware vendors. The model could be similar to Microsoft’s, which lets dozens of handset manufacturers license its Windows Mobile operating system for their hardware. It would also be similar to the Android OS, however, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) does not charge for the software. To date, Palm has developed both all the hardware and software for its handsets, which is costly and time consuming. Palm’s capacity to develop more devices going forward will be seriously constrained by its cash balance. With partners, it could extend the webOS brand to more phones, and even other emerging devices, like tablets or e-readers. In the MarketWatch interview, Rubinstein called the idea “an interesting concept” and said Palm may be willing to do so, if the “right strategic partner came along with the right kind of business model.”

Most of the buy-out candidates listed, including HTC, Dell and Lenovo, currently use either Windows Mobile or Android, or both.

Reuters reported today that its sources said HTC decided to pass on buying Palm after reviewing the company’s books. Huawei also declined to bid. With HTC’s departure, Lenovo became the leading candidate. Lu Chialin, an analyst at Macquarie Securities in Taipei, said: “They’ve got a lot more free cash and don’t have the brand presence in the United States, so that will all give them that boost they need.”

Related

• HTC Says It Is Mulling The Benefits Of Owning An Operating System
• Is Palm Putting Itself Up For Sale?
• Is HTC Interested In Palm?
• Lenovo Considers Acquisitions For Mobile Growth
• Palm’s Stock Dives As Analyst Downgrades Target Price To $0
• Palm’s Struggles Will Handicap Its Ability To Ward Off Upcoming Competition

One of the world’s leading newspaper auditors has added mobile phones to the list of mediums that it tracks, providing validation to the wireless industry, while also potentially giving publications a shot of new readers as traditional print audiences decline.

To do so, the interactive unit of the Audit Bureau of Circulations has partnered with Verve Wireless, which works with more than 600 newspaper publishers in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. Together, the two will be able to audit mobile applications, mobile browsers and even e-readers, like the iPad. Although the service will be limited to Verve’s clients, it marks the first official time the ABC (NYSE: DIS) has tracked mobile usage.

The audience size is not trivial. Verve said more than nine million readers accessed news from mobile devices using its publishing platform in March, jumping 243 percent compared to the prior year. In 2010, it expects to serve more than 2.2 billion mobile news pages. Separately, ABC said it found in a survey of member publications, that more than 80 percent said consumers would rely more heavily on mobile devices as a primary information source over the next three years.

A spokesperson for ABC said up until now it has not been tracking mobile, but some papers have been able to extract data from companies like Omniture (NSDQ: OMTR).

“With all the buzz around the iPad and with use of mobile browsers exploding, newspapers and their advertisers are increasingly interested in seeing mobile metrics detailed in ABC reports,” said Michael Lavery, ABC president and managing director, in a release.

News Corp. (NYSE: NWS) has invested in Beyond Oblivion, a one-year-old music start-up, as part of a second round of funding worth $10 million.

The second-round investment was disclosed in a regulatory filing yesterday. CNet reported that according to multiple sources the New York-based company is working on a plan to help consumer electronics makers pre-load music on portable devices and computers. The service could be similar to Nokia’s Comes With Music, which allows users to download an unlimited number of songs for a year with the purchase of a phone.

So far, Beyond Oblivion has not been able to acquire music rights from the major record labels, but perhaps that’s where News Corp. could help out. It already operates MySpace Music, which is run in partnership with the four major recording companies.

On the company’s web site, it has a countdown clock to “insurrection day,” which now stands at roughly 170 days and 22 hours. The clock is counting down until Nov. 10, or as they call it 10-10-10.

The company describes itself as a music service that combines the stickiness of a social network with “unlimited life-of-device access” to the largest music library on Earth. Content owners are paid per-play no matter if the original music file was ripped, bootlegged or legally or illegally downloaded.

Verizon Wireless is starting to feel the effects of more than 90 percent of Americans owning a cellphone.

In the first quarter, Verizon added only 423,000 post-paid wireless subscribers, which was the lowest number in nearly a decade, AP reports. The number also fell short of already conservative Wall Street estimates. Analysts had forecasted postpaid additions of 582,000 postpaid additions, according to a Reuters poll. Verizon ended the quarter with 92.8 million customers.

Still, Verizon Wireless was able to increase revenues by 4.4 percent compared to the year-ago period, mostly due to a 26.4 percent increase in data revenues (which are being driven by the adoption of smartphones, like Verizon’s popular Droid and BlackBerry line-up). Verizon said during its conference call that 36 percent of sales from its direct channels were smartphones that carried a $30 monthly data plan and 24 percent were from multimedia devices, which have a $10 monthly data plan attached.

Verizon’s chief competitor AT&T (NYSE: T), which has the blockbuster iPhone at its disposal, also struggled to add customers now that cellphone penetration in the U.S. is nearing 100 percent. It added slightly more than Verizon, or 512,000 postpaid subscribers.

Both companies are trying to combat this trend by increasing revenues through data plan adoption and adding second and third lines through the adoption of other connected devices, like e-readers or other gadgets. Verizon’s CFO John Killian told Reuters (NYSE: TRI) he expects Verizon’s postpaid growth to improve, by luring customers away from rivals with the offer of the latest smartphones and higher-speed data services. “We don’t necessarily think we’ll be at 423,000 every quarter. We do think we have the ability to do better,” he said.

Verizon will have to work particularly hard to offset the declines on its wireline side of the business. In the first quarter, operating revenues for wireline totaled $11.2 billion, a decline of 2.9 percent compared to first-quarter 2009. The company continues to see demand for its FiOS broadband internet business. It had 9.3 million connections at the end of the quarter, increasing 4.3 percent year-over-year. The increase in FiOS Internet connections more than offset a decrease in DSL-based High Speed Internet connections.

The company earned a profit of $2.28 billion on total operating revenues of $26.9 billion. Compared to the year-ago quarter, profits fell 28.8 percent, and revenues gained 1.2 percent. Verizon’s wireless business recorded operating income of 4.6 billion on revenues of $13.8 billion.

Engadget has uncovered this little nugget of information, and while unconfirmed, it’s fairly juicy: Dell will launch a mobile phone called Thunder later this year that may come loaded with an integrated Hulu video application.

To date, Hulu executives have said they are interested in bringing the popular online streaming TV service to mobile and portable devices, but nothing has yet materialized from the NBC Universal (NYSE: GE) – Disney (NYSE: DIS) – News Corp (NYSE: NWS) joint venture. A collaboration with a Dell phone doesn’t make a whole lot of sense since the computer-maker’s efforts in mobile in the U.S. so far have been limited to one phone launch with AT&T (NYSE: T). However, the phone will be running the Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Android OS, hinting that it could be available on multiple devices from various phone manufacturers.

Other specifications leaked in the documents describe the phone as a status symbol made for the professional. The phone comes with a 4.1-inch screen, ties into Facebook and Twitter, and has Swype as a touchscreen keyboard replacement. It also supposedly includes Flash 10.1 for watching videos and a 8 megapixel camera.

If the Hulu app does indeed come on the Dell Thunder, that would not preclude it from launching on any other device. Fox Mobile Group, which is part of the News Corp. family, has announced a mobile video subscription application that will launch on a variety of handsets, including Android, BlackBerry and iPhone. Called Bitbop, there’s no indication so far that it would be connected to a Hulu mobile launch. The documents leaked to Engadget do not provide any additional details about Hulu, such as whether it will be free or paid. Fox’s Bitbop plans to charge $9.99 a month.

»  Jumptap is rolling out a feature that lets consumers manage their own profiles for “a more personalized brand experience.” The feature, which will come mid-year, is in reaction to consumers wanting to be more selective about brands they want to interact with. Jumptap also partnered with Medialets and Crisp Wireless. Release.

»  Hipcricket has expanded its mobile ad network for brands and media companies to reach consumers via SMS and mobile display ads in applications and on the mobile Web. When originally launched in 2008, the network was focused on driving sales to Hispanics. Release.

»  Nexage has launched a metrics report that looks at mobile eCPMs during the month of March. It found that eight out of 11 ad networks fluctuates as low as 37 percent and as high as high as 89 percent of an unspecified maximum eCPM. Report.

Mobile-phone subscribers in the U.S. spent nearly 60 percent of their time on the phone accessing a social networking site, making the category the most visited by far when on the phone. In fact, time spent on social networks easily exceeds other high-profile sites such as online portals and typically well-integrated carrier sites.

According to Ground Truth, a measurement firm that receives data directly from the carriers and other sources, the average subscriber initiated 68.1 sessions, consisting of 310 pages viewed for a total time of 52 minutes and 12 seconds on social networks from the phone’s browser. The data does not include usage from mobile applications. During the first full week in April, top social networking brands, like MySpace (NYSE: NWS) and Facebook, did fairly well, but the true highlights were mobile-specific brands like MocoSpace, AirG and MBuzzy. In terms of the amount of time spent with an individual site, MySpace averaged 40 minutes; Facebook, 30 minutes, MocoSpace and AirG an hour and a half each, and MBuzzy for one hour and nine minutes.

Other categories didn’t even come close. After social networking, portals (presumably sites like Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) and Google), were only used 13.65 percent of the time; operator portals were even visited less frequently at 9 percent.

Ground Truth’s VP of Marketing Evan Neufeld said in a release: “Facebook and MySpace may be the most addictive pastimes on the PC, but sites like Mocospace and AirG command more attention on mobile phones…This data points to the fact that there is a whole universe of media properties advertisers need to consider that have to date been largely ignored. It also demonstrates that traditional media companies that are not focused on the Mobile Internet—both browser- and application-based usage—risk losing market share to leaner, more mobile focused companies.”

The one thing that may be get people to forget about yesterday’s massive iPhone leak is if Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) blows away its second quarter earnings today—and it did.

The Cupertino, Calif.-based company posted revenue of $13.5 billion and a profit of $3.07 billion, or $3.33 a share. Analysts expected earnings of of only $2.44 a share on $12 billion in revenue. Even for Apple, which typically beats expectations, the numbers are excellent and mark the company’s best non-holiday period ever. In the same period a year ago, Apple recorded revenues of of $9.08 billion and a profit of $1.62 billion, or $1.79 a share.

Apple sold 2.94 million computers (a 33 percent increase over Q2 2009); 8.75 million iPhones (a 131 percent increase) and 10.89 million iPods (a one percent decline). Some analysts guessed Apple would sell only 7.25 million iPhones. Most impressive is that iPhone sales were flat or slightly up compared to the previous period, which includes the busy holiday season. In the year ago period, Apple sold 3.79 million iPhones.

Outlook: In Q3, 2010, Apple expects revenues in the range of about $13.0 billion to $13.4 billion and diluted earnings per share in the range of $2.28 to $2.39. This period will be the first to reflect Apple’s new iPad, which rolled out during the current quarter and sold 450,000 in the first week it was available, and the new MacBook Pro product line.

The company will host its second-quarter earnings conference call at 2 p.m. Pacific. It can be streamed live at www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/earningsq210/. The company’s stock was briefly halted before earnings were released, but trading resumed with investors pushing the stock higher in after-hours trading. The stock was up more than $1, or less than one percent, to $245.76 a share.

Related

• Apple Meets Deadline—Just Barely—With April 30 iPad 3G Delivery
• Apple To Gizmodo: You’ve Had Your Fun, Hand Over The Phone