A new report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project suggests we have entered the era of the mobile application. The use --- and particularly the growth --- of apps is trending such that it now is where the industry action is.

The report indicates more than one-third of adults --- particularly men and young adults --- have applications on their smartphones, although only one-quarter of adults use them. It is, as the report suggests, pretty significant in view of the fact there weren't such applications only a couple of years ago (pre-iPhone and Android).

Among cellphone owners, 29 per cent have downloaded apps and 13 per cent have paid for them.

The New York Times reviews the declaration last week that the Web is dead by contending with media history. Its conclusion: Media adapt to newcomers and rarely die just because of them.

"Today, traditional media companies face the adaptive challenge posed by the Internet. That challenge is not just the technology itself, but how it has altered people’s habits of media consumption," writes Steve Lohr.

But Lohr notes that history shows evolution, not dissolution, is the order of the day when media are threatened by new forms of communication. What is different this time is the speed of change and the disruption of consumption patterns. As one academic tells him, change has changed.

College students don't wear watches, they carry cellphones as time pieces. They don't email, they text. People don't talk as much on phones; they text and arrange calls for important matters. People aren't blogging as much; instead, they're using social networks to tell their stories.

A few weeks ago the Digital Media Test Kitchen at University of Colorado unfurled some impressive work on the early stages of mobile applications from newsrooms. It's worth taking another look at one element of its work on the specific challenges for news organizations as they embrace --- or don't --- mobile.

Author Lauren Seaton concludes that the initial apps coming into the market are tepid, far less innovative than non-news organizations are producing, and she wonders why.

"While templates and layouts are similar from app to app, they generally lack originality and creativity," she writes. The smartphone offers opportunities for news organizations to reach audiences, but "most of the news applications that have been created by single news brands do not do enough to encourage interactivity, customization, or creativity."

In another chapter on the far-reaching report, author Jordan Wirfs-Brock notes the new uses emerging with smartphones and suggests opportunities exist for news organizations in such areas as geo-location, augmented reality, voice-to-text, financial transactions, push reminders, social incentives, multi-touch, and gesture.

It is difficult to call the different approaches between Google and Apple a war. After all, Google pays Apple to put its search technology on the iPhone.

But there are signs of clear rivalry, some brinksmanship, even something akin to corporate war.

On Monday, for instance, Google introduced a do-it-yourself application builder, based on tests involving nurses, grade schoolers, high schoolers and undergraduates with no computer pursuits. The aim is to make it relatively simple to create an application that will work in the open-source sphere of the Google Android smartphone.

By comparison, Apple is betting on proprietary applications it will vet and possibly veto. Google has no such filter; if it works, it works, and clearly Google is betting that its approach will win the war (skirmish, rivalry, contest) in due course.

The implications for newsrooms: It'll be important to create apps for both major forms of smartphones. On Monday that got easier.

Eric Schmidt is not the first one to say it, but the Google CEO's view is meaningful when he pronounces the smartphone as the future --- indeed, the equivalent of the arrival of the television in terms of elevating the knowledge base of parts of the world.

Web search, smartphones and translation software are the keys to that knowledge-building, Schmidt says in an interview with The Guardian in advance of a speech he's delivering this week.

At the moment, he believes the best engineering work is being conducted on developing applications and systems to deliver content across mobile devices.

"That's a big news thing – that's equivalent to the arrival of television," he says.