A report today from comScore reveals that iPhone owners consume more mobile media than people with other handsets. (Admittedly some might argue it's not much of a revelation because the iPhone has been designed for this purpose).

The Apple iPhone has just 4% market share in the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy, although iPhone users represent 12% of all mobile media users. comScore's report says 94% of iPhone owners use mobile media, 87% use applications and 85% browse the mobile internet. The average for all smartphones is 65% mobile media, 53% web browsing and 53% app usage.

The BOLT mobile internet browser from Bitstream has rendered over a billion web pages. Launched in February 2009, it's now used by more than 7.3 million people in over 200 countries and has also streamed more than a thousand years of video.

As with rival mobile browsers from Opera and Skyfire, BOLT offers desktop-style page rendering by transcoding data via the company's own servers. It supports HTML5 & Flash video and is compatible with most mobile phones.

The latest study from comScore shows that social networking is the fastest-growing content category on mobile devices, with web browsers remaining more popular than applications for accessing online content.

78% of smartphone users accessed their browser in April 2010, while 80% of smartphone users accessed applications. In comparison, just 19% of feature phone users accessed their browser, with 17% accessing applications. However, the larger number of feature phones means that web browsers remain more popular overall.

A new report from Juniper Research says the continuing surge in mobile internet usage, combined with the increasing number of smartphones and featurephones with built-in integrated GPS receivers, will see location-based local search and information services used by nearly 1.5 billion mobile users by 2014.

Vodafone has been working with Opera to bring the mobile internet to more people in developing markets. The two companies have developed an enhanced version of Opera Mini 5 that's been designed to run on budget handsets using 2G networks.

The Opera Mini 5 browser has been embedded in a range of 20 devices and can also be downloaded to over 250 GPRS supported handsets in Vodafone’s customer base. Opera's browser compresses data, requiring  less processing power on the handset and less network capacity as well. Vodafone is also creating an on-screen browsing experience that'll feature step-by-step, simple instructions in local languages, with a strong emphasis on the use of intuitive icons to help those with lower levels of literacy.