I know it’s a conundrum you’ve just puzzled over for years. When will “the mobile” “arrive”? What will it take to get mobile payments off the ground in the US? A month ago, we looked at Read Write Web’s series on this subject, where they concluded that mobile payments wouldn’t take off until a site users know and trust implemented a secure system.

Facebook has already announced a mobile payments “solution” (all buzz words get scare quotes today) with Zong—but Amazon might beat them to the punch. Amazon, one of the (if not the) most popular online commerce sites, premieres its own Mobile Payments System today—and it’s not just for their site.

All of the talk these days is about smart phones. The iPhone, BlackBerry and Android’s of the world often get the bulk of the media attention but there’s more to the mobile market. AT&T is seeing that as it is now enabling non smart phone users who use ‘older’ phones to see some of the same local advertising that the smart phone people do. Personally, I am not sure if this is a blessing or a curse for those legacy phone users but that’s not for me to decide.

ClickZ reports on some information passed along at the Mobile Ad Summit in New York as Matt Crowley, CMO, AT&T Interactive talked about this approach

According to statistics released by Bango Inc, BlackBerry is now the third most popular mobile phone for browsing the web in the USA, accounting for 14% of all mobile traffic. BlackBerry is also placed fifth in the UK and worldwide, above all Apple iPhones, with Nokia remaining the overall global leader with over 36% of traffic seen.

Once seen as only for business with their slick functionality and features, BlackBerry devices are increasingly becoming the preferred handset for consumers wanting to browse the internet from their phone. The BlackBerry 8330 Curve now accounts for over 28% of BlackBerrys browsing the web.

Okay, since you wrote about Spotlight on the new iPhone OS 3.0 (see How to work with Spotlight on your Apple iPhone 3.0), can you also explain to me how the heck the new Voice Memos application works? As far as I can tell, it’s the only other new app included in Apple’s iPhone 3.0 upgrade but I can’t figure out how the heck it works…

I use Mobile Me with my iPhone now, and am finding that the gallery feature is pretty cool, but it’s tedious as heck when I have to upload them one at a time. Isn’t there a smarter way to do this on my Apple iPhone 3GS?

I finally updated the operating system on my second generation iPhone and the new OS is definitely cool – and faster – but I’m not too sure how to use Spotlight, the search feature that so many people have been talking about on Twitter and elsewhere. What does it really do for me and how do I get to it?

The Android Ion Phone from Google IO which is similar to the upcoming myTouch 3G has a battery life when compared to the G1 that just keeps going and going.

I have been away from blogging here at GoogleAndBlog due to speaking at the Internet Marketing conference SMX Advanced in Seattle most of last week as I slowly had reassurance not to check my phone for the red blinking battery dying light.

One of the cool new features of the Apple iPhone 3GS is the ability to take videos. Nice, but I can’t figure out how to get to the video camera? I know how to take photos, though, so I figure it’s related to the iPhone camera (rather obviously, eh?) I have also heard that you can edit the video right there on the iPhone, but I don’t believe it. I mean, isn’t the screen too darn small?

The Google Mobile blog confirmed last week that the new Palm Pre will come standard with numerous Google Apps such as Search, Maps and YouTube.

Palm is calling its operating system webOS for good reason — all applications running on webOS leverage a WebKit-based rendering engine for content, which made it easy to port Google Maps to the platform.

I sat in a session that’s of great interest to me and that’s mobile PPC (and mobile in general). Cindy Crum from Rank-Mobile opens up the session with a general outline of PPC ads, the devices they’re built for and how you can create the ads.

She notes that there are some tremendous limitations to creating mobile ads in the text allowed (due to limited screen space).

She talks about the higher bid rates due to the fact that users of mobile search rarely visit page two. Whether this is due to better results when searching local, whether the nature of mobile search is different (my guess is that this is it) or people’s lack of patience with mobile due to limited screen space and the generally lackluster user experience due to people not optimizing their sites for mobile was not covered but I’ll be sure to interview her tomorrow and get to the bottom of that.