In announcing the demise of the portable cassette player last year, Sony made me feel ridiculously old — I think I had my first Walkman when I was 10 and blasted my home-duped Pink Floyd cassette (“Dark Side” on A, “Wish You Were Here” on B) until the tape disintegrated.

But now the Walkman is back — Sony is showing off an Android-powered Walkman prototype that will connect to Sony’s cloud-based music service, which reportedly has 10 million songs, as well as run Android apps. The company plans to target audiophiles with the device and its S-Master MX suite of audio technology for clarifying and improving quality.

As an amateur audio engineer and mixer, I’ll tell you Apple’s audio output across all devices is really mediocre. The intuitive music library management functionality of the iPod was its chief selling point (and something no one else has gotten close to), not it’s sound quality. As I still yearn for the quality of my LP records (or at least a CD), this new Walkman seems very alluring — this could be the first real competitor to the iPod Touch.

But Sony tends to be good at identifying a target market. Though Sony stopped making cassette-playing Walkmen, it’s kept the name for its MP3 players — in particular the W series headphone-style MP3 players, which are aimed at athletic types. The fast-charging (3 minutes plugged in equals 60 minutes of music) 2 GB players are designed specifically to deliver high-quality audio during activity — think running or time at the gym. In addition to staying out of your way, a water-resistant seal keeps your filthy sweat from corrupting the electronics.

To market the latest generation, Sony has teamed up with Active Networks and its owned and operated site Active.com to run a highly interactive marketing campaign aimed at runners. Reaching around 3 million U.S. uniques a month, Active.com is an online social community for sports and athletic activities that also focuses on healthy living.

In addition to providing branded content for the website, Sony has collaborated with Active.com to build runner-focused communities on numerous levels. Check out the First Race Community, which aims to help runners approaching their first 10K, half-marathon or marathon. The electronics company is also hosting a booth at Active’s Rock’n'Roll Events. Finally, the two companies will assemble 120 amateur athletes across the nation to be brand ambassadors for “Team Sony.”

Recognizing that developers need to monetize their apps (particularly the freebies) with ads, Jobs told the crowd gathered at Apple’s iPhone 4.0 developer preview that the quality currently available mobile advertising “sucks.” He suggested that advertisers are approaching mobile the same way as online — too focused on search.

And browsing and searching takes a backseat in the mobile arena; as I heard at the Think Mobile conference hosted by MediaBistro, mobile marketing is all about apps, apps, apps (something I’ve been writing about for a while). Jobs noted that the average iPhone user spends 30 minutes a day in apps.

So imagine he or she is served one ad every three minutes — that’s 10 impressions per day per user and more than 1 billion impressions daily for the iPhone community.

Along with the iPhone 4.0 operating system, which will not appear till summer but was released for developers, was the unveiling of “iAd” mobile ad platform focused on the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch that Jobs promised will make mobile advertising “engaging and emotive.”

With the addition of multitasking to the OS to enable swift app switching, iAds, which Apple will sell and serve, will keep users in their apps. Judging by the preview apps for Disney and Nike, these ads are basically micro-branded apps that include games, video and other interactive features.

In other words, iAds are going to be apps within apps; they’ll even offer the power to purchase apps and more, and you’ll be able to return to your regular app whenever you choose.

Jobs promised that iAds will be better for monetizing apps for developers; Apple will offer a 60/40 split, with the developer getting the larger share. In addition, iAds pooh-pooh Flash for HTML5.

However, beyond some cools demos and exposition, Jobs offered very little specifics: price model and metrics, something most marketers are highly concerned with, were skipped over.

Also, at the Think Mobile conference panelist after panelist suggested ignoring other mobile platforms at your own peril. If you’re just focusing on one platform, Handmark CEO Lance Reddick quipped, you might as well ask, “Which 80% of the market do I want to ignore?”

Sure iPhone users are the most engaged mobile, but more people are pumping away on their BlackBerrys. (Granted we’ll have to see how this changes over the summer when Sprint and Verizon get their own iPhones.) The spread of Google’s Android OS seems unstoppable as its mobile share keeps increasing.

And yeah, everyone wants an iPad now, but when the HP Slate comes out with a Windows operating system at a fraction of the price — followed by several other similar devices that our less expensive than an iPad — don’t you think that interest is going to wane?

Apple excels in creating closed-off systems, systems that work very well, but a closed-off system for advertising? No matter how cool the demonstrations may look, a network limited to one platform is kinda unappealing.

More than half of all public wifi locations will be free in 2010, reported JiWire, which has a registry of 289,000 public Wi-Fi locations across 140 countries and surveyed 2,000 public wifi users in December and January. The company witnessed a 21.9% growth in public wifi locations in 2009, with an overall increase of 8.2% in the fourth quarter. A big driver in this bump were free wifi campaigns sponsored by Microsoft and Google over the holidays, which saw hikes in usage at aiports by 26% and cafes by 22.9%

While the days of scraggly hipster types dragging their laptops to cafes for free wifi is certainly not over, 56% of respondents said they connected to public wifi using a smartphone or other mobile device and 14% said they used their mobile device as a primary connector to public wifi. Two of the top 10 mobile devices used on public wifi were not phones, but the iPod Touch and the Sony PSP.

While iPhones and iPod Touches remained the leaders in public wifi share by operating system, Android hopped 167% in market share. The iPhone OS actually slipped 2% in market share.

Excuse me, one moment — I’ll take a double quarter pounder with cheese (no pickles) while I check my email on my smartphone… Plus a Diet Coke — watchin’ the girly figure.

IPod Touch traffic saw a large growth in Decemeber as well as with its smartphone operating system market share, according to AdMob.  The iPod Touch is now the number 2 device in the AdMob Network with 4.7 percent share.

Smartphone share increased from 22 percent of total requests worldwide in May to 33 percent in December. Symbian is the number 1 smartphone OS worldwide with 41 percent share. In Asia and Africa it has more than 90 percent share, though the iPhone is surging in Latin America and Europe.

The iPhone OS had 32 percent worldwide share in December, up from 6 percent in May. Worldwide, RIM has 10 percent and Windows Mobile has 9 percent OS share. Both are strongest in North America and Latin America.

Palm has 4 percent of smartphone OS share worldwide with more than 95 percent of its requests generated in North America. In the US, Palm had 9 percent share in December, declining from 20 percent in July. Android leads Symbian in North America with 2 percent of OS share.

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