I seem to have spent most of my time living on aircraft lately, with many visits to Operators in both Europe and North America – In spite of the economic news it’s great to hear from both sides of the pond though that mobile broadband usage is really taking off! 

This is a trend I can only see continuing with the arrival of new devices such as Blackberry’s Bold and Storm, Google’s G1 and HTC’s Touch – To some degree all these devices have borrowed from the iPhone’s innovation and it was interesting to hear this week that the iPhone had outsold the Blackberry during the July-September period – With Apple shipping 6.9m units versus RIM’s 6.1m.   With the Bold launched this week and the Storm set to arrive before Christmas this trend may well reverse – Although Apple seem to be way ahead of anybody else when it comes to tying-in a rich and exciting array of applications for end-users. 

Globally, Nokia is still leading overall smart-phone sales, although only by a couple of percent – And in spite of being focused on easy application access, I am not sure they have the same momentum as Apple in this space. Quite a few of the Operators I have been talking to have downgraded their original mobile broadband growth forecasts for 2009 – Partly in response to the economic downturn and partly because of revisions to projected growth, that had  ranged from 4 to 16 fold, quarter on quarter! 

For my part I believe we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg and I expect to see these downward revisions, blow-away within six to nine months – The reason for this is that mobile broadband device innovation and application usage is still in it’s infancy. Although Apple has done a great job of helping catalyze the transition to mobile broadband, the combination of hyper-competition between Operators and smart-phone manufacturers, combined with the rapidly increasing adoption of more and more mobile broadband applications can only help stimulate further accelerated growth.