Opera recently released its monthly State of the Mobile Web report for July, offering up in-depth insight into all facets of mobile Web usage worldwide.  As usual, this month’s report has some surprising data.

For July, Opera Mini saw increases in all three categories of growth including unique users, pages viewed and data consumed.  In all, 62.3 million people used Opera Mini in July, 29.6 billion pages were served and 4.1 petabytes of operator data were compressed.  Yes, that’s PETAbytes.

In terms of growth worldwide, Asia showed the most substantial gains.  From July 2009 to July 2010, pageviews in the top 10 countries in Southeast Asia increased by 238%, unique users increased by 205% and the amount of data transferred increased by 227%.

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Millennial Media today published its “Mobile Mix” report for July, highlighting device trends from OEMs and others in the mobile ecosystem.

Apple devices and the Android OS still reign supreme as Android is now the second largest OS on Millennial’s platform for the first time and Apple’s devices now account for nearly 35% of total impressions.  Motorola showed growth for July as well, with the Droid moving into the top three in July’s “Top 20 Mobile Phones” with a 5% share of impressions and the Motorola Cliq entering the Top 20 for the first time.

Surprisingly, Nintendo made its entrance to the “Top 15 Manufacturers” in July, coming in at number 15, while the iPad continued its insurgence with a 32% increase in total requests.  Also interesting is news that RIM is growing in popularity with developers, as RIM apps now represent 11% of the “US Developer Platform Usage Mix” for July.

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Smaato recently reached an important milestone in the mobile advertising industry – it reached the five year mark.  Celebrating its fifth birthday, the company announced it’s now serving over six billion mobile ad requests per month with over 7,000 publishers signed into its network.

The company has been busy despite its anniversary, also announcing a new whitepaper entitled “The Mobile Advertising Ecosystem,” which describes how app developers and mobile publishers can best navigate and monetize mobile advertising opportunities.  “Smaato has produced this whitepaper to help give an overview of the industry to those taking their first steps into mobile advertising,” said Harald Neidhardt, Smaato CMO and Co-Founder.  ”We hope that the information in this paper and the monthly Smaato Metrics help to educate and provide a benchmark to demonstrate that mobile ad-optimization can drive effective monetization on a global scale.”

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Opera recently released its State of the Mobile Web report for June, showing decreases for the first time in all three growth categories — unique users, pages viewed and data consumed.

While there were decreases across the board, Opera attributes it to “certain countries where we have experienced some technical and political challenges that now are about to be solved.”  Still, Opera had over 59.4M users as of June 2010 – a 3.2% decrease from May, but an increase of 124.7% since June 2009.  Opera users viewed over 27.3 billion pages in June, down 3.4% since May, but an increase of 161.8% since June of 2009.  As for data consumed, users generated over 416 million MB of data for operators worldwide.  Since May, the data consumed went down by 4%, but is up 147.1% since June of 2009.

This month’s report was focused on the mobile Web’s role in the 2010 FIFA World Cup, and as such, listed the top 5 global sports sites in terms of usage during the month of June.  ’Goal.com’ came in at number one, followed by ‘livescore.com,’ ‘fifa.com,’ ‘m.championat.ru’ and ‘m.espn.go.com’ respectively.  Also highlighted was mobile Web usage and trends in Africa.

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Distimo published its latest report on mobile apps today, highlighting some interesting tidbits for the mobile app ecosystem.  This month’s report focuses once again on in-app purchases, as related to the many app stores it covers.

Distimo includes data from the Apple App Store — separating data for iPad and iPhone apps — as well as Blackberry App World, Android Market, Nokia Ovi Store, Palm App Catalog and the Windows Marketplace for Mobile.  Probably the most interesting finding this month was in relation to in-app purchases between iPad apps compared to iPhone apps.

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Millennial Media published its latest S.M.A.R.T report for June this morning, showing that the US mobile Web has grown by 3% — from 75.3M to 77.4M active users.

Millennial’s US unique audience reach also increased 2% since May’s report, growing from 61.5M to 62.9M users month-over-month, showing an impressive 81% reach of the mobile Web.  As another interesting demographical stat, the report states that Hispanic and Black multi-cultural audiences continue to lead in mobile data usage in the US, with Millennial’s June rankings of the top US mobile DMAs being comprised of high multi-cultural populations.  The top 5 DMAs for June were Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Phoenix and Sacramento.

This month’s spotlight was on the Entertainment ad vertical, as the industry as a whole in embracing mobile in a big way.  For example, a 300% increase in DVD-release campaigns since Q2 2009 signaled recognition by movie studios that mobile advertising can be used to effectively drive results across all product release windows — i.e. motion picture releases, DVD releases, VOD and more.

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On Tuesday, we covered some basic download stats for both Univision and ESPN’s World Cup mobile apps, and today comes detailed stats from the WC2010 World Cup Blackberry app from Polar Mobile- which includes some rather impressive mobile advertising results.

The app itself was downloaded a total of 265,408 times during the course of the World Cup, and nearly 115,000 of which used it at least once per day on average, representing 43% of users who downloaded the app.  Beyond downloads, usage of the app was equally impressive- with the average user viewing 11 pages in the app each day, totaling 26,020,983 page views during the tournament, 7.72 million cumulative app opens and 98 page views per active user over the 30-day period.

A viral nature also took hold, with 15% of users sharing the app via email and 5% sharing feedback on the app.  The usage stats alone are stellar, and the engagement of the app went well beyond other apps, especially noting that this is an exclusive Blackberry application and not an app on the more popular Android or iOS platforms.

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