The tepid initial sales of the Google phone notwithstanding, this is definitely the year to start watching Android. ComScore reports that Android's share of the smart phone market doubled from 2.5% in September to 5.2% by the end of last year. Other stats I see here and there show that Android's share of mobile Web activity is spiking noticeably. I imagine that much of this sharp growth is coming from Motorola and Verizon's DROID-related campaigns.

For several years now, a number of mobilistas like me have been waiting for that breakthrough Super Sunday when somehow the biggest ad event of the year acknowledges, validates or accelerates in some way the advance of mobile marketing. And every year we seem to be disappointed.

I really believe that mobile advertising offers marketers a platform for engagement that fixes some of the problems the Web introduced -- namely clutter, diminishing share of voice, lack of user focus, ad invisibility, and a real tie between ad and context. As I argued in my last piece, the sponsorship model and brand integration with content can be enormously effective on mobile and in ways that never really evolved on the Web. And so, as if on cue, our friend from InsightExpress, Joy Liuzzo, sends me a deck this week on the latest benchmark, cross-campaign studies comparing mobile brand …

Now that a bit of the fervor over branded apps has died down, it has become clearer to a lot of marketers that not every brand translates easily into the kind of utility consumers really want on their phone. Some publishers tell me that they are getting a lot of interest from marketers who want to be sole sponsor of new branded media apps. Instead of buying up a new audience for their branded app, they prefer to align with a tool and a media source brand that has already built an audience.

Whenever you hear an ace pitchman like Steve Jobs start a presentation promising something "magical," you know that he's probably about to overreach what he actually believes is true about the product. And then, within minutes he pronounces the "magic" of "having the whole Web site in the palm of your hands." Yeah, the dude is selling himself as much as he is selling us. That is not a bad thing, necessarily. I really don't think any of us knows right now whether a device like the iPad will fit within our everyday use cases. Until then, we just have …

Can't anyone in the mobile industry count? The frustration over getting reliable metrics from mobile media continues, although digital veterans shouldn't be surprised. We are a decade and a half into the life of the "most accountable medium," the Web, and just this week we see some of the major online measurement firms still tweaking their models and arguing over methodology

My mobile bookmarks runneth over. A little adventure in mobile Web browsing for my last column quickly turned into an obsession this week, as I started popping into the address bar every brand name I came across. It wasn't always pretty.

Why can't I pop most brand names into my mobile browser and get a decent interactive experience yet? To hell with all of the hype about brands and agencies finally getting serious about mobile. Yadda, yadda. Most of them seem to be leap-frogging the basics.

As news from Haiti comes first to many of us via our mobile devices, it calls attention to the feature and interface arms race that currently is going on in mobile news. In the app space especially we have providers like CNN, Guardian, and Time magazine making relatively late entries, but with very interesting ideas.

Conceptually, there is nothing new to Google's "Near me now" search function. It taps the geo-location available on the phone to pull in nearby listings. So does Yelp, Foursquare, and any number of user-generated local directories and augmented reality programs like Google's own Goggles and Layar. What it does do is simply shorten the usual mobile search process and also provide a more seamless set of results. It also elevates local search functionality on phones to that front-page search box. Google is trying to get us in the geo habit.