A quarter (25.9%) of consumers in the big five European Union countries (UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain) now browse the Internet via their mobile phones.   This is according to comscore’s MobileLens survey (via Marketing Charts), which shows that the rates of mobile Internet use range from 36.7% in the UK to 20.4% in Germany.

The UK also leads in the % that accessed news (36.5% compared to the European average of 29.7%) and accessed a social network while on their mobiles (23.8% vs 14.9%).   It’s Italy however that has the highest rate of Smartphone users (33.6%), while Spain (56.1%) has the highest number of 3G subscribers.

It should be said that the UK figures are a little different to Ofcom’s recent Communications Market Report (summary here), which showed that only 18% of Brits access the Internet via their mobiles – however comscore’s figures come from June, while Ofcom’s report is a comprehensive year in review and so draws data from Q1.

Comscore says that the number of mobile music users has grown by 10% over the past year, meaning that there are now 54 million consumers in the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain who listen to music via their mobiles – or 23.8% of the total.

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• UK citizens flocking to the mobile web (v3.co.uk)
• Britons spend half their waking hours ‘plugged in’ (telegraph.co.uk)
• Why Smartphone Adoption May Not Be as Big as You Think (mashable.com)

The other week Twitter reported that the record for the number of tweets per second was broken, when there were 3283 during the Japan / Denmark match at the World Cup.

Surprisingly, even though Twitter says on its blog that the final Spain – Netherlands match “represented the largest period of sustained activity for an event in Twitter’s history”, the actual number of tweets per second for Spain’s winning goal was lower at 3051.

However, the World Cup again shows that while Foursquare is still in danger of being a Second Life style phenomenon that is popular and fizzes out, Twitter has found several real and useful roles.

One is that so-called influencers who are able to take conversations elsewhere over-index on it.   Another is that it comes into its own during live TV events – such as the World Cup – where the shared social experience adds to what you are watching on the box.

Twitter has produced a number of interesting infographics.   The wordle image below is the final Spain goal in tweets and in different languages:

And finally, an image showing how Twitter use grew during the competition itself (click on image for larger size):

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• World Cup an event of unmatched tweeting (theglobeandmail.com)
• The 2010 World Cup: a Global Conversation (twitter.com)
• Bits Pics: Twitter Usage During the World Cup (bits.blogs.nytimes.com)

Symbian, a name you don’t hear in the news that often, yet according to Comscore it’s still be far the most popular platform for smartphones in Europe, being included on both Nokia and Sony Ericcson devices.

In the five major European markets (Britain, Germany, Spain, Italy and France), Comscore says that Symbian phones have a 61% market share with Apple trailing in distant second with 14.5% – though Apple performs better in both the UK (20.5%) and significantly, France (29.9%).

Meanwhile the UK has the highest no of smartphone users at 11.1 million.  That means that in the UK, smartphone penetration stands at 22.6% of the total (ie 3/4 of the population still uses a plain old mobile), while 3G penetration stands at 41.7%.

31% of people in the UK browsed the Internet on their phones (22% in Europe as a whole), 18% accessed social media (11% in the EU5), while 13.7% of UK mobile phone users accessed the news.

In other words, the nay-sayers who point out that the vast majority of mobile phone users as yet do not use their phones for many of the things they use their PCs for, are of course right.   However, at the same time, the trend is moving in only one direction, with smartphone adoption increasing by 70% in the UK over the past year.

It’s also worth noting that US smartphone usage is very different to that in Europe, with RIM (blackberries) having 41.3% of the US smartphone market, compared to 8.3% in Europe (and 18.7% in the UK).   By comparison, Symbian doesn’t feature in the top five US smartphone platforms.

(Source, Marketing Charts)

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• UK leads Europe on smartphones (newstatesman.com)
• Report: Mobile Handset Market To Rebound In 2010 (thenextweb.com)

Another study to put the nail into the paywall coffin comes from the Gfk Group (via NewTeeVee), which found that only 13% of people will pay for online content.   And that’s 13% across the US AND Europe, with 16,800 people being surveyed, so a pretty heavyweight study.

Even worse, 42% of European and 21% of US consumers expected absolutely everything online to be free in the truest sense of the word – i.e. without even any ad support!

Things do look marginally better in some countries, in Sweden (the home of Spotify…and also the Pirate Bay) almost a quarter (23%) will pay for content while here in the UK the figure is 18%.   By contrast in France, 50% even expect everything to be free with no ads, while in Spain the figure is 54%.

I’ve translated the table from the German press release (Click for bigger image)