RIM PlayBook is the latest tablet to slash prices
Best Buy cut prices for Research In Motion?s PlayBook tablets as part of a Labor Day sale.

Prices for several PlayBooks were discounted by $50 or $150. The PlayBook tablet with 16B memory normally sells for $499 and was offered for $449 during the sale. A version with 64B memory was discounted $150 to $549.

The move follows a recent blow-out sale for HP TouchPads, which were sold for $99 a piece after the company announced that it would stop manufacturing mobile devices in the fourth quarter. The success of the sale, however, prompted HP to later decide to produce another run of the tablet, making additional TouchPads will become available soon.

The Weather Channel had 79.7M page views for Irene
The Weather Channel had almost 80 million page views on its mobile platform on Saturday, Aug. 27 as Hurricane Irene was moving up the coast of the Northeast.

The busy day also saw 163,000 downloads of its mobile application and the most video streams ever on The Weather Channel iPad app. Aug. 27 was also The Weather Channel?s third busiest for its mobile Web presence, with 15.9 million page views.

By device, The Weather Channel?s Android app had 15.8 million page views on Aug. 27, the iPhone app 35.4 million, the BlackBerry 3.3 million and the iPad app 11.2 million. Additionally, features phones had  4.3 million page views and smartphones 8.6 million. The total number of page views that day was 79.7 million.

The total number of unique visitors for The Weather Channel brand across channels was over 90 million people.

App inventory skyrocketing: Flurry
U.S. app inventory is growing at a staggering rate and could absorb the equivalent of the entire U.S. Internet display advertising spend by the end of this year, according to a new report from Flurry.

The company estimates that over 600 thousand apps are available for over 350 million iOS and Android devices worldwide. On average, consumers have downloaded over 65 apps per device.

Flurry found that the average number of ads shown per application session is 4.3.  The average application session is 4.2 minutes.

Flurry tracks about 20 percent of all sessions in the market and extrapolated from there to come up with a market size. This inventory was compared with the net spend on display advertising in the U.S.

Back-to-school shoppers head to bricks-and-mortar stores: Mobile Posse
Only 3.7 of consumers plan to do back-to-school shopping online, according to a new survey from Mobile Posse Inc.

The Mobile Insights survey showed that 96 percent of consumers plan to head to retailers and bypass online shopping for this year?s back-to-school shopping.

More than 22 percent of consumers plan to spend more than $100 on back-to-school shopping while 29.2 percent expect to spend between $26 and $50. The survey also revealed that nearly 40 percent of consumers say that ?low prices everyday? is most important when shopping for school supplies while 35 percent say sales are most important.

One-third of shop consumers plan to shop at a discount store and only 6.5 percent care about specific product availability.

Marketers can boost online purchasing by emphasizing the variety and low prices of items online, offering free shipping and promoting ordering of supply kits that can be picked up or delivered, according to Mobile Posse.

Mobile population totaled 115M users in July: Nielsen
The leading mobile destinations in terms of unique visitors for July included Google Search, Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and The Weather Channel, according to new data from Nielsen.

The mobile population totaled 115 million unique users for July and there over 600,000 apps in the Apple and Android app stores.

Google Search had 63 million unique visitors in July, Facebook 46 million, Gmail 45 million, Yahoo! Mail 40 million and The Weather Channel 30.5 million.