I’m catching up today on the 300+ e-mails I got while I was out of reach (partly by choice) last week, vacationing in London.

One thing I noticed was that everyone there seemed to have a high-end phone (Web-enabled, etc.), and – perhaps unlike here – people in England actually used the full capabilities of their phones. This observation pushed me to look back at the Online Publishers’ Association study from this spring, “Going Mobile.” And, sure enough, it does seem that mobile phone users in the United Kingdom do actually use the full capabilities of their phones more than mobile phone users in the United States. Here’s the report. To further back this up, Telephia late last year reported people in Europe are adopting the mobile Web faster than their American counterparts.

And right after I got back this weekend, I saw this article from The New York Times: “Mobile Web: So Close Yet So Far.” Michael Fitzgerald wrote the mobile Web seems to be a really hot area right now, but “It all looks good, but the wireless communications business smacks of a soap opera, with disaster lurking like your next dropped call.” The challenges include the need for a truly high-speed data network for mobile (not even the iPhone can flawlessly deliver on that) and difficult to use mobile browsers. It’s possible that the Google platform and other developments in the next five years will really make the mobile Web more user-friendly and faster.

Fitzgerald wrote, “For now, widespread use of the mobile Web remains both far off and inevitable.”

“Far off”, however, doesn’t mean newspapers can ignore the mobile Web. Technology changes quickly and it’s vital that newspaper Web sites be on the mobile Web now. The most prolific users of the mobile Web in the future – the people who will give your newspaper lots of mobile page views and support your advertising – are probably going to be many of the same people already using it today (the early adopters).

A few quick unreleated catch-ups:

NAA: Online Advertising Grows Significantly in 3^rd Quarter
Advertising expenditures for newspaper Web sites increased by 21.1 percent to $773 million in the third quarter versus the same period a year ago, according to preliminary estimates from the Newspaper Association of America. The increase reflects the fourteenth consecutive quarter of double digit growth for online newspaper advertising since NAA started reporting online ad spending in 2004. The continued year-over-year gains have demonstrated the importance of newspaper Web site advertising, which now accounts for 7.1 percent of total newspaper ad spending, compared to 5.4 percent in last year’s third quarter. Read more here.

New York Times’ Web Editor Spruill Taking Questions
Fiona Spruill manages The Times’s Web newsroom, which is made up of the 60 producers and editors who are responsible for publishing NYTimes.com 24 hours a day. Her staff is focused on creating a site that takes full advantage of the online medium by creating original multimedia, encouraging reader participation and packaging the news in smart ways. She’ll be taking questions all week from site visitors. Ask her a question here.