That’s a lot of phones with removable memory slots! Of course the real trick will be educating consumers on actually purchasing these cards and using them, but that’s up to smart merchandisers and to some extent companies like SanDisk to figure that out. I can’t imagine the Carriers are thrilled with the concept of pre-loaded memory cards as it potentially cuts them out of application download revenue share and data usage fees, but nevertheless the concept has potential to spur consumers to utilize their handsets for more than just phone calls.

There have been companies (SEE ROK Media) that have loaded content onto mobile memory cards in the past, but the uptake to my knowledge has been negligible in a retail scenario. A good sign that this concept might work is that the practice of “sideloading” content, especially music, has had very good traction – especially outside of the States. Consumers, primarily youth, have discovered the cost savings associated with downloading and sharing music while bypassing their Carrier’s networks.

Marketers, especially those targeting Generation Y consumers, might start experimenting with mixing mobile content such as music or games with utility applications (e.g. the Kellogg’s Exercise reminder) that showcase the brand being promoted. Rest assured that their will be unique advertising opportunities within the memory card as the developers have significant control over the card’s actions.

Media companies dabbling in Mobile today may view mobile storage cards as yet another distribution outlet for their video content. I can certainly envision NBC packaging a special “OFFICE” SD Card filled with short snippits of the show’s best bits.

Interesting, but certainly not a shocking prediction given the rapid adoption of smartphones here in the U.S. and the increase in promotions from the Carriers for low-cost, flat rate data plans. However, there are a couple of things to consider when thinking about whether or not Mobile Email will be a next BIG thing that marketers will need to pay close attention to with regards to optimizing the consumer experience on a handset.

First of all, email users will need a data plan of some sort and Nielsen Mobile recently pegged the percentage of consumers with an unlimited data plan at 14%. The research firm also stated that 95 million (37%) subscribers paid for mobile internet access either as part of a subscription or transactionally and that 40 million subs were active users of mobile internet (used at least once in a given month).

There is an important distinction to make within the aforementioned numbers in that they don’t represent (at least I don’t think they do) those consumers accessing email via emails readers from say Good or Blackberry versus their mobile browser. It’s safe to assume that most corporate users are accessing email via a reader versus a browser, but as MMetrics noted, the smartphone penetration rate is close to 7% within the U.S.- This number isn’t exactly huge, but there is data that supports that these users are heavy users of email via their devices.

From an overall addressable market, MMetrics stated that 13.1% of wireless subscribers had used email on their phone during a specific time period and Nielsen Mobile stated that eMail was the second most visited category (on the mobile web) after Portals. Again, were not talking huge numbers, but significant enough to warrant a closer look at the consumer experience.- (NOTE: as of May 2008 Yahoo! had 14 million unique visitors to their mobile mail page according to Nielsen.)

I did some quick testing of some HTML emails via my Yahoo! email account on Nokia’s S60 browser, Palm’s TREO 750W browser and an Openwave browser via Verizon’s popular LG VX8300 handset. On each browser HTML gets stripped out and the rendering is not easy on the eyes to say the least. I even tried GMAIL on the Treo browser and some of the hyperlinks within an HTML newsletter were rendered inactive. On the reader side, trying to read HTML emails via a Blackberry reader or Palm reader produced equally frustrating results.

From a marketer’s perspective if you are targeting an on-the-go business crowd or a demographic that utilizes smartphones, it may not be enough to assume that handset OEMs, browser developers, internet email providers and email reader vendors will utilize tools and transcoding tricks to properly render your campaign emails properly. Your message may be lost and deleted before the consumer ever has the chance to re-read your email on their PC.

That said, there are some companies such as Pivotal Veracity that offer to optimize your emails for the various device types and email readers. (This company has some interesting comparison shots of how html emails render across a handful of different devices including Blackberry, Palm and Windows Mobile.)

Quick Anecdote: when attending industry events such as CTIA or MMA or presenting to advertising agencies it is always fun to watch a decent number of users fumble around on their smartphones when you ask them to participate in a demo via SMS. They have gotten so used to sending short emails back and forth between other smartphone-toting colleagues that TXTING is now an afterthought.

Okay.. with only around 15% (much higher for iPhone and Smartphones users) of total U.S. subscribers regularly accessing the internet from their phone – the “reach” numbers for marketers are fairly low with regards to rushing to build a mobile presence. The obstacles to getting more consumers to use their phone for browsing the internet are well documented. Putting aside for a moment that the U.S. has approximately a 26% 3G handset penetration rate and approximately 14% of subs have unlimited data plans (according to Nielsen Mobile)… and small screen sizes, lack of content, etc.etc.. What about browser usability?

Could the current browsing/data display methods be a significant hindrance to adoption as well?? You bet. So what’s on the browser horizon?? No one other than the representative from the speech recognition company vlingo really talked about future browsing paradigms. He said his company was working hard on using speech to search for information on the mobile, but reiterated that at the moment they struggled to find technical “hooks” into browsers to enable speech-powered browsing.

I’ll dig around to find what might be out there , but in the meantime there is an interesting 3D data visualization project I am watching out of MIT called E15. The gentleman behind this project is starting to tinker a bit with 3D browsing on the iPhone. ALSO – with the advancement of GPS-enabled handsets the ability to get location relevant information while browsing may turn out to be very interesting as well. Stay tuned.

– NOTE: optimization of web content for the small screen was discussed and so was transcoding. While you can argue that this either hurts or helps the mobile web cause, the issue I’m still interested in is the browser and how it displays information and how the mobile user interacts with it – these two “methods” are simply adapting to the current paradigm.