People with smartphones are playing more games on their handsets… but the number of people gaming on non-smartphone devices is falling. Those are some of the findings from a study released this week by digital marketing intelligence company comScore.

The number of people playing games on 'feature phones' (i.e. not smartphones) fell by 35% between February 2009 and February 2010. This contrasts with a 60% increase in the number of smartphone gamers. However, with feature phones accounting for around 80% of the overall market, that resulted in an overall 13% drop in the number of mobile gamers.

In our podcast on 31st March, we talked about Vodafone's partnership with British Gas. 'Smart meters' with a mobile GPRS data connection are expected to help nearly a million UK households manage their gas supplies by the end of 2012.

However, although these meters won't need fast mobile data, ABI Research anticipates a dramatic growth in machine-to-machine connections using 4G services. Its latest report says the number of 4G M2M modules shipped worldwide will jump from around 40,000 this year to 12.6 million in 2015.

The latest Orange Digital Media Index (ODMI) has just been published, giving information about the consumption of digital media on mobile phones.

Nearly two million Orange customers use their handsets for social networking, visiting over one billion mobile web pages each month. 64% of mobile social networking users are men, with the average man viewing a third more pages than women when they visit social networking sites. However, women send more SMS and MMS messages than men.