Mobile apps have been such cute and cuddly little icon-ish things on our smartphones for the past few years, it may have been easy to forget that they are, after all, media. Like questionable TV infomercials and dastardly Web sites, apps can be bad actors, too.

The success story that is the tablet platform just keeps rolling. Today JP Morgan upped its forecast for sales in 2011 to 51.9 million units , up from 46.1 million previously. Analyst Mark Moskowitz estimates that Apple's share will remain at about 70.9% this year and drop only to 62.8% next year. No clear number two player has emerged, he says, and he even argues that we may not see one until Windows 8 arrives late next year. Amazon, while a potent entrant into the market, may be challenged by Android's shaky OS for tablets, he says.

If you haven't yet caved to the New York Times paywall restrictions and ponied up the subscription fee, then you may have let your iPad app for the brand lie unused in recent months. Ralph Lauren gives you a reason to revisit the app with a program that gives users full article access to select sections of the Times and fills many of its ad spaces with lush Lauren creative.

As publishers churn out ever more apps for smartphones, the challenge of monetizing all this additional inventory increases. While display advertising clearly has a place here, mobile does offer content owners the opportunity to leverage their users' attention in new ways, without porting to the small screen the clutter and poorly targeted garbage that renders so much of online advertising virtually invisible.

I have already snoozed my way through a couple of Android-based tablet demo units in recent months, so I admit that I greet this week's Forrester projection with some skepticism. The researchers got their expected headlines the other day in predicting Amazon's less-than-secret upcoming tablet could seriously dent the iPad juggernaut and sell 3 to 5 million units in the fourth quarter of the year. So striking and provocative did Forrester believe their prediction would be that they withheld the report for a week "out of respect for Steve Jobs," says analyst Sarah Rotman Epps.

There is a lot of waiting that goes into summer. Whether it is sitting in airports or just plopping down in a chair at Lucky's or Express while you wait for wife and daughter to shop at leisure, I find myself spending more time with my iPhone deck than I have in recent months. Generally in these outings I am only needed at the tail end of the experience, so there is time to kill remembering all of the cool stuff I downloaded and stopped using long ago. Perhaps it is the draw of the iPad each evening, or just …

Entrepreneur Jeff Jackel tells me that he came up with the idea for a "transient" location-based social network while sitting in the left-field bleachers at a Los Angeles Angels game. "Everyone around me was on their phone. I wondered, why can't I connect with the other 40,000 people who are doing this, and why can't the Angels connect with me right now and do something with us here right now? That is what basically got in my head."

There are many themes and individual insights that occurred to me as I red-eyed it back home from this week's Mobile Insider Summit. Don't let the perfect get in the way of the test, was one mantra I kept hearing explicitly and implicitly in many presentations and discussions. It was remarkable that Michael Callahan of Century21, Beth Murphy of Travelocity, Jeff Haddon of OfficeMax, BJ Emerson of Tasti D-Lite and Jeff Cloud of mall owners GGP all discussed their brand's mobile approaches in historical terms, as iterative journeys. No one was trying to convey the impression that they really "get …

"I don't think anyone else here is doing this," my wife complains, as I take another picture of a wall at the local mall. We are on a QR hunt, testing out on her the QR code prompts that have now started to spring up like skin infestations on the signage around retail storefronts. "You look like a building inspector recording violations," she adds. "Do you see anyone else in this mall snapping these things?"

I must be ahead of the curve when it comes to mobile marketing into the movie-going segment. If there is one segment for which much of my pre-purchase process has moved to mobile, it is for movies. According to mobile social network MocoSpace, the Hispanic mobile segment is also scouting out the forward edge of mobilized movie marketing.