I already reported in a former post the fact that already 28% of mobile phone users worldwide have accessed the mobile internet. Now Tomi T Ahonen puts this figure a bit more in perspective in his post What happens when majority access web via mobile phone:

Growth of the PC based internet is slowing down. Growth of the mobile phone based internet is accelerating. Only 41% of all internet access is by people who only access by PC. Already 25% of all internet access is only by mobile phone. Soon more people will access by mobile than PC. How soon? By 2008.

He may be a bit optimistic, but the trend is clear.

Personally though, I don't look at it that way for european countries and just recently I said here that I see a lot of promise in the combination and convergence of different media. I called that post It's print-internet-mobile, stupid! Why? Simply because print and PCs are already well established and as you can see in Japan - even though the mobile is very very important, the japanese print figures are not that bad. The same goes also for VG in Norway.

In January I had a presentation before all the major media guys here in Switzerland, and I showed the following slides (here you see only a part of) which can be read without knowing german. That should be pretty self-explaining.

See also:
IPSOS Study: Mobile Phones Could Soon Rival the PC As World’s Dominant Internet Platform

Your Cell Is A Slacker: Mobile Phones Are More Fun Outside The U.S.

In the unconventional category was a service the two cited called LISMO, which allows Japanese users with GPS-enabled cell phones to find out which songs are the most commonly downloaded ones on their home street or in the nearby area.

[...] And not everything on Bellows and Collier's world tour was a strange sideshow. They spent one of the longest chunks of their tour discussing the increasing viability of using cell phones to buy stuff. This application, they said, is booming in Japan. They described an Amazon.com-like cell-phone service called GirlsWalker that boasts 9 million subscribers.

Get Ready for 'Cellcasts'

With UpSnap, which launched 100 free mobile podcasts on March 27, you can simply dial a number to listen to your program from your phone. In a few weeks, the service will also allow users to get podcasts to their phones wirelessly by sending UpSnap a text message. Rival Pod2Mob allows for the text message feature and has built a user base in excess of 100,000 since its launch last summer.

* disclosure: I work for Kaywa *

At Kaywa you can since a long time download mp3 files from the blogs via the mobile version (just add /mobile to the weblog address to get it). Here is an example from last year: http://schweizerdeutsch.kaywa.ch/mobile/dialoge/pimp-my-uni.html

Recently we tried out other stuff, something we call "phonecasting":

1. You call a number, speak what you have to say, sing etc, save it and it's immediately blogged.
2. It's also immediately available as a podcast
3. and you can listen to it by dialing another phone number (which costs CHF 0.50 extra).

As for now that works only for Switzerland, unleass you want to pay, the hopefully soon to be abolished, roaming costs. But if you are interested, drop me a comment.