Welcome to Mobile Discontent! Apparently The U.S. Mobile Industry Is Doomed.

Just in time for this blog’s practice-launch comes the big news item of the day: IDC's report that "Mobile Entertainment Services [are] Not Particularly Popular Among American Consumers." Money quote:

"The survey also revealed a small group of U.S. consumers that believes data services are a bad idea, or worse, degrade the calling experience. Education may help this issue, but it's clear from the survey results that many people just want to use their mobile phone to make calls."

Key numbers:

72.5% of total respondents (mean age 36.2) used no data services besides messaging in the third quarter of 2006.

47% of 18-to-24 year-olds complained that mobile data services are "too expensive."

By contrast, 47% of survey respondents (some percentage of them presumably 18-to-24-year-olds) have sent SMS messages.

Cost to read full survey yourself instead of being spoon-fed pieces of it by bloggers and/or journalists: $4,500.

Of course, people once just wanted their music players to play music, and before that, just wanted their computers to compute. TechCrunch has some perspective on the matter: its forecast is less bearish, at least for the long term, than its totally awesome post title, "Study: You Hate Mobile Content," implies. Such a post title. Clearly I have much to learn from the masters.