Mobile Content Bits: Art As Mobile Wallpapers, Mobile Browser Growth, iPhone Development Surge

-- Independent Artists Gain Mobile Outlet: A new service available over SMS and online enables artists to sell original works as wallpapers for mobile. Hands-On Mobile launched mixtArt today and many of the first artists featured on the platform will be at ComiCon later this week in San Diego to unveil the art pieces that have been made into wallpapers thus far. The project is expected to get refreshed with new wallpapers every month. ( Release.)

-- Pre-Installed Mobile Browsers To Drive $492 Million By 2013: Mobile browsers that are pre-installed on mobile phones is expect to bring in at least $492 million by 2013, according to a new report by ABI Research. ( Release. Keep in mind this is information gathered from only one source, so it may not be accurate.) The firm also pointed out the growing strength of open-source browsers such as WebKit and Gecko, which power the iPhone's Safari and Firefox browsers respectively, however commercial browser vendors such as Opera and ACCESS are seeing business growth as well, the firm said.

-- iPhone Development Surged In Three Months Leading To App Store Launch: The iPhone was the most popular testing platform for developers in the previous three months out of more than 1,500 handsets available for testing with DeviceAnywhere, a mobile testing and monitoring company. (Keep in mind this is information gathered from only one source, so it may not be accurate.) Following the release of the iPhone's SDK, the firm says it saw an unprecedented rise in the amount of hours developers spent testing for the platform, logging 1,155 hours over the three-month span.Five most popular handsets on DeviceAnywhere's testing service over last three months:1.iPhone ? 1,155 hours2.Blackberry Pearl ? 1,050 hours3.Nokia ( NYSE: NOK) N75 ? 1,006 hours4.Blackberry Curve ? 871 hours5.Motorola ( NYSE: MOT) V3m ? 609 hours Lemonquest has taken part in this...it has releasedCirculate Prologue, a teaser for the full game to come later. Players move the phone itself to play the game, rotating the entire game board by doing so in order to guide balls to their required places. ( release)For its part, WashingtonPost.com has launched a City Guide iPhone application for Washington DC, which lets people turn their iPhones and iPod touches into an entertainment guide for the city. It has GPS, search, reviews and so on.

Science Via Mobile And Baseball: The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation is sponsoring a competition powered by Hot Lava Software dubbedSports Bytes Competition. It aims to get kids interested in science by interacting with them through their mobile phones during the downtime of a baseball game. The idea is to ask trivia such as "which goes faster, a softball or a baseball" and use that as a launching point for baseball-related science. ( release)

Presidential Comics: IDW Publishing and GoComics are publishing a pair of graphic novel biographies:Presidential Material: Barack ObamaandPresidential Material: John McCainat PresidentialComics.com. Because it's GoComics its also on mobile, downloadable through gocomics.com/presidents, on some US carriers and on the mobile web. It will be interesting to see which format sells more?