New parental rule: You know your kid is really ticked off at you when a heated SMS exchange gets kicked over to email. "I'm done being nice about this," my daughter started in after deciding that the laundry list of my transgressions had exceeded the limits of heated bursts in 140 characters or less. In fact, poking through my girl's teen force field and into an honest conversation has been an object lesson in the unsettled state of new-media narrative. As I discussed in my last post, we are in that Neanderthal period of mobile media where we don't yet …

We're going to get pickier about the apps we download as the novelty wears off and the torrents of mobile content start wearing us down. Most of us know this intuitively as, over time, we tap into the App Store just a little less often and we come to see just how many icons on our handset never get used. Our own behaviors and past experiences with app consumption may well be reteaching us how to use the platform going forward.

Given the app-happy state of things in the mobile arena these days, it's easy to forget that the mobile Web continues to thrive. A sobering stat comes out of the latest comScore research on mobile usage, for instance. While 55.7 million Americans now own smartphones, only 32.3% of all mobile subscribers used a downloaded app in August. Slightly more, 34.5%, used their mobile Web browsers.

Since I began covering mobile media back in 2004 or so, I seem to have been writing an annual rant that urges Nintendo to come in and "own" the mobile gaming market. For years, feature phone game design sucked so badly no matter how many big guns were aimed at it, mobile seemed the perfect place for this master of simple, clean gaming.

Years ago, my daughter explained to me the appeal of SMS among her peers in a convincing way. "You don't have to listen to them and you don't have to answer." In other words, SMS is great for teens largely for what it is not: full-on human discourse. And what it represents is control. "On a call you get stuck having to listen to them and not knowing how long they are going to talk. You can't get off," she says. There may be a lesson in this for marketers. SMS is not really a conversation, and we may not …

Just when I thought I was going to set the iPad aside for a while and move on to other topics, AKQA drops a truly impressive piece of brand advertising in my lap that the agency just deployed for VISA. More than any iAd I have seen, and certainly more than any magazine app ad yet, the "This is No Ordinary Wallet" creative is in harmony with the device's touch interface and nominally magical toy-like allure. Finally we have an iPad ad that has some whimsy and dramatizes a brand.

A funny thing happened on the way to the focus group research on iPad magazine apps. The readers actually asked to see those ads again. For this month's issue of Media magazine, I covered the magazine industry's enthusiasm for tablet platforms. Both Sports Illustrated's content chief Terry McDonnell and Jerry Beilinson, deputy editor of Popular Mechanics, related having the same unprecedented experience in their iPad focus groups. The testers asked to go back and see the ads again. It surprised both of them. In research like this, "you don't see that," says Beilinson.

Auto advertisers have been trying to figure out what to do with the iPad in recent months. The default modes seem to be either to mimic a magazine or mimic a video site. I am sure there are already (or coming soon) branded car racing games of the sort that made the VW GTI launch last year famous. But so far, the auto-zines on the iPad I have seen only hint at ways to do what should be a no-brainer: engage a touch interface to sell a car.

Yesterday Nielsen Mobile released a torrent of survey stats about mobile app usage and attitudes towards mobile advertising. The dominance of games, social networking, search and weather among mobile users was unsurprising. But the one set of figures that hit home for me was the rate of app usage among feature phone users.

Several years ago, "Saturday Night Live"'s Fred Armisen did a Steve Jobs send-up involving ridiculously minute iPods, culminating in the "iPod Invisa": too small to actually see, but when you drop it, it floats. We are almost there.