A recent Nielsen study shows that regardless of the platform (iPhone, Android, BlackBerry or Windows Mobile) the apps that are most commonly used show what people on the go are interested in. It’s friends (Facebook), weather (The Weather Channel), music (Pandora) and what’s local (Google Maps). Here’s the picture story.

What is interesting is that Twitter only made the Top 5 for the BlackBerry OS. Speaking as a recent BlackBerry user that moved over to the world of Android, the Twitter BlackBerry experience was one of the few that I found to really translate on a BB device so it kind of makes sense (to me at least).

The study is full of other information such as what people do when using mobile and the most popular “next steps” is more research. If you haven’t paid attention to the importance of local presence in Google Maps and other places by now you are going to miss out. More smartphones equals more research on the go which means greater dependency on Google Maps and Place Pages. Get it?

The last chart doesn’t bode real well for mobile advertisers because even with the most likely group to pay attention to ads are 13-17 year olds, 87% of that top group say they only sometimes or actually never look at mobile ads. That number goes well over 90% as the demographics move to older groups. Not a great statistic but what do you expect when evolution talk these days should include a category called “Increased ad blindness capability”?

So we learn more about people today in the mobile age. Actually do we, though? Finding out that people want to know where to go with their friends and how the weather will while they listen to music getting there is not real revealing or new. What is new, however, is how we get the things we want to know, which is more “instantaneously” than ever before in human history.

Feel free to download the full report from Nielsen.

What’s your take? Is this how you view the mobile experience?