With a new tablet-optimized portal page and experience in its Editions news app, AOL is very big on tablets. But the company wants to extend its new desktop less-is-more approach to the platform.

"Sir, you aren't booked in this hotel until next month," the clerk said as my heart sank. My wife was already gasping for air at the check-in counter, she was laughing so hard. A crafted romantic getaway had been thwarted by my mishandling of the iPad.

As fellow Mediapost columnist and social/mobile guru David Berkowitz pointed out the other day in one of my MoBlogs, it is pretty much astonishing that Facebook has allowed such scale to accrue on mobile without a clear monetization path here. In fact, from a consumer's perspective, Facebook was among the first smartphone apps to make the case that mobile could be a superior platform to the desktop for some core interactive media habits. Not only was the Facebook interface cleaner and more usable in an app, but the smartphone seamlessly converged all of the multimedia input tools that could bring …

"Who is that, and what the hell is she wearing?" my daughter asked as the NBC Super Bowl pre-game show started with some country-like bleached blonde in silver lame pants singing the unctuous intro. I had a vague memory of this woman, but I was clueless. And this was only the first of countless times in the next few hours I couldn't ID someone who clearly the rest of the country knew as a celebrity.

Funny thing about the 425 million monthly users of Facebook on mobile devices: they don't monetize well, and Facebook itself admits it is unsure when and how they will. In all of the press attention to the size and overall prospects for Facebook's new public form, the elephant in the room that seemed to elude notice was sitting in every analyst's pocket. In fact, in yesterday's SEC filing for its proposed initial public offering, social network and mobile Goliath Facebook underscores the prospect that its massive popularity on devices could pose a business risk.

At last week's Mobile Insider Summit in Key Largo, Fla., Yelp, Google Maps, and all the other usual suspects I consult for nearby resources were not going to be of much help here. We were in another world. The remote, painfully exclusive Ocean Reef Club wasn't the kind of place where you will find quick takeout, a 7-Eleven or a chain of any sort. No, if we wanted to hear directly from local merchants using mobile marketing, we were going to have to airlift them in. Which we did. For a superb panel on how real local businesses are using …

The other day at Best Buy I encountered my first sighting of a mobilized tag-team couple. In the lead, the wife picked up cameras and accessories and recited the brands and model numbers, while the husband did mobile lookups on Amazon and barked out prices. These two had it down to an efficient science and a great division of labor. She was curating choices and he was acting as a kind of C3PO digital assistant.

If the new "Numberlys" interactive story and game on the iPad looks and feels like a German Expressionist movie poster that somehow found its way onto "Sesame Street," you aren't far from the mark. In this follow-up to the hugely successful "The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore," the creators at Moonbot admit that Fritz Lang had more than a little to do with the monochrome modernist aesthetic. A series of drone-like bots in a world of numbers tries to build a new consciousness by discovering an alphabet. Mixing highly filmic sequences right out of Lang's "Metropolis" and straightforward …

There was a lot of time to multitask during last Sunday's Golden Globes. Ricky Gervais was tepid at best, and generally unfunny at worst. The winners often seemed unaffected by the award themselves. And there was no apparent drunkenness. Unless a celebrity is embarrassing him or herself, or Gervais is doing it for them, I hardly see the point of this show. It was a good time to warm up the iPad and see what was on that screen.

Mobile coupons are a no-brainer. Not having to clip, save and remember to carry print promotions is a convenience that should in theory supercharge the coupon format. But apparently it will take some brains to figure out how to execute on the promise.