It is a rare meeting these days when the standard iPhone App ‘facts and figures’ are not banded about with the frequency of…well…an iPhone App download.

Taking into account recent stats released by Apple claiming that over 55 apps are downloaded every second (with up to 2 billion having been downloaded thusfar), you would be forgiven for thinking the Apple App Store bears a striking resemblence to the meteoric rise of the Internet itself. In fact, over the past 7 days I have heard the metaphor ‘New Web’ more than once, and while I certainly ascribe to the mantra of positive thinking, this latest comparison is a bit of a stretch.

Let’s start with what we know. 2 billion app downloads to date. 125K Developers creating apps. Over 85K apps (with almost 10K being added in a recent 3-week period alone). And let’s not forget the countless stories of that solitary developer making over £300K overnight from a simple shooting gallery app. To a certain extent it’s all true. But it’s also grossly misleading.

Considering that the top 100 paid apps (or 0.4% of all apps) account for almost 15% of the total revenue generated via the App Store to date, it is important to realise that the Apple App Store is not ‘easy money’. As pointed out in a previous post, iPhone apps can be an ideal first product in an emerging channel or mobile strategy. Certainly the PR, the reach, and the ‘demo value’ alone have proven irresistible for many major brands and content owners. But are iPhone Apps the ‘New Web’? The iPhone itself (while beating the socks off  other smartphones in terms of application success) is still just a single handset. The Web (if we must compare) relies on multiple pieces of software operating on multiple pieces of hardware tied together by one (generally) universal code. xHTML-based Mobile Web sites get close to this promise allowing multiple handset browsers to achieve a similar experience, but functionality and aesthetics still lag significantly behind the typical iPhone App. So while we may conclude iPhone Apps (and perhaps Android/Palm Pre/Blackberry Apps) are becoming the de facto standard for internet and content access on mobile devices, I’m afraid the ‘New Web’ they ain’t.

Regardless, iPhone Apps are clearly revolutionizing the way people access information on the go – with other smartphones poised to take an even bigger piece of the pie in months to come. But as I always stress to my clients, when it comes to emerging channels it is critical to define a roadmap strategy that matches your core content and business offering – whether that includes Mobile Web sites, Facebook Apps, or yes – even the iPhone.

After all, the next ‘New Web’ is just around the corner…

Finally (!) – stats on the iPhone and Android app markets and user behavior metrics that even Apple’s UE Guideline Gatekeepers would approve!

The kind (and creative) folks over at ismashphone.com have just released this year’s ‘must-have’ office poster – a very modern collage of iPhone, iPod Touch, and Android user habits complete with a few choice stats that are sure to pop up on some of our PowerPoint presentations in coming weeks.

Some cool points of note:

• iPod Touch users download the most apps
• Over 50% of iPhone and Android users spend a whopping 30 minutes a day on apps (!)
• iPhone users pay the most for apps
• iPhone and Android users download 10 new apps per month

A quick capture of this cool graphic is below – but click here for the extra-large version. Enjoy.

I don’t know about you, but the term ‘Augmented Reality’ is mentioned so often and so casually in almost every meeting I have participated in for the past month, you would think most people would know what it really means, and where all this is headed. Beyond the typical ‘meeting mentions’ for Augmented Reality Android and iPhone apps such as Layar, Wikitude, and Nearest Tube – few people grasp just how all-encompassing ‘AR” will truly prove.

Rather than try and describe with words – which is the first mistake of detailing Augmented Reality – the following video by Nokia Future Technologies & Research Center attempts to illustrate one vision of what Nokia has dubbed, ‘Mixed Reality’. Caveat – some of the concepts are very real, some very silly – but all of it is possible, and yes – all of it is coming in some form or another. Most importantly, it puts the current craze of iPhone/Android ‘AR’ apps in a bit of perspective…

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGwvZWyLiBU&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

Kudos (as always) to The Media Futurist Gerd Leonhard for directing me to this video.