Iron Ink Media: Inked Up

While I don’t think anyone will dispute that the iPhone user interface is much better than Windows Mobile, it was until recently lagging behind Windows Mobile in terms of overall users. Well that is no longer. According to a recent comScore survey, the iPhone now has some nine million users as compared to seven million for Windows Mobile.

So take that, Microsoft.

The iPhone also leads the world in mobile web presence, accounting for about half of all mobile web traffic.

Wow! Go, iPhone!

AT&T is getting fed up with people using up too much of their bandwidth on the iPhone. The company says that only 3% of iPhone users take up 40% of the bandwidth and it is a problem for areas with heavy iPhone usage such as Manhattan and San Francisco.

AT&T’s head of consumer services, Ralph de la Vega, said that a different pricing system could be coming to discourage people from hogging bandwidth with things like streaming audio or video. This would be “to either reduce or modify their usage so they don’t crowd out the other customers in those same cell sites,” he said.

We can’t see this endearing AT&T to Apple and could very well hinder a chance at getting a new exclusivity contract.

The research firm IDC predicts that by the end of 2010, the iPhone and iTouch will about 300,000 apps available for download. Certainly not a crazy prediction considering how many apps come out on a daily basis.

Our question is this: How many apps will be out by then that are worth a damn? Now that is a much better question.

With AT&T’s exclusivity running out on the iPhone, it seemed to most that Verizon would be the next to get it. Not so, says industry analyst Dough Reid.

Reid told The Street “Apple wants to move away from exclusivity; T-Mobile would achieve this for Apple in the U.S.”

While T-Mobile is a much smaller company, they do have the same GSM network as AT&T. This means that Apple wouldn’t have to manufacture a whole new device in order to work. This could be the deal breaker for Verizon.

But, we don’t know that this would happen. AT&T has some 71 million customers and T-Mobile has about half of that. The solution could be to offer the iPhone to both companies and then let users select which one they’d like to use.

Stay tuned on this one.