A new Nielsen study has pointed out the obvious fact that people use their smartphones and tablets while watching television. I do it all the time and chances are you do too. However, Nielsen took the study a step further by finding out what owners of smartphones and tablets were doing while watching television. The results aren’t that surprising, but the accompanying statistics are.

A new study conducted by Nielsen has shown that when it comes to Android smartphones, users spend way more time with apps than the actual web browser. Despite the fact that the web browser on the recent Android phones offers close to the same experience you’d get on a PC or laptop, mobile users want an experience that is optimized for their devices.

Following its study into Netflix usage on individual devices, Nielsen has returned with another report detailing the leading smartphone manufacturers and mobile operating systems in the United States. It’s no surprise that Android and iOS are leading the pack, but now we’ve got numbers to back it up.

It seems every day I write about the digital television transition. According to a study by The Nielsen Company, 6.5 million homes are not ready for the digital transition if it happened today. The last time there was a study on this, 7.8 million homes were unprepared. That study was in December of 2008.

The study is about readiness and not about awareness. There is also data on which markets are most and least prepared. Apparently the people of Albuquerque and Santa Fe are the most unready folks in the country with a whopping 12.24% completely unready.

This Tuesday, October 28th, NYC is cutting out analog television for three minutes. They aren’t pulling any punches; analog signals will go dark between 5:58PM and 6:01PM right in time to mess up most news programs.

If you aren’t aware, on February 19, 2009, all television broadcasts in the U.S. will be digital. If you (or more likely, your grandparents) have a television without a digital tuner, you will not be able to watch free over-the-air television without a converter box.

Where did they get the idea to do this? Maybe from some friends of ours. Check out more after the break.

Nine months to go before the U.S. gives birth to an all-digital television landscape, and a new report from Nielsen shows the patient may be having some labor pains.

As reported by the New York Times’ Brian Stelter, Nielsen Media Research’s findings on the state of DTV readiness show that 25 million “unprepared” households have at least one TV that will go dark after February 17, 2009, the date all TV stations stop sending out analog signals and switch to digital. “Completely unready” are the words used to describe 10 million of those 25 million homes; that is, all the TV’s in their homes – if they have more than one TV – get their signals via antenna. That’s 17 percent of all prime-time viewing. Nielsen says that African-American and Hispanic households will bear the brunt of the lost signals.

The Consumer Electronics Association, the trade group that represents most of the companies manufacturing TV’s, has begun its DTV educational campaign. For the CEA, it’s all about context. CEA spokesman Jason Oxman told me in an email response that Nielsen is counting as unprepared homes that do have some kind of digital cable or satellite access. “Put another way, if there is even one TV in a cable/satellite household that is not plugged into the service (for example, it is used to watch DVDs or play video games), Nielsen counts that household as unprepared,” Oxman says. “For the 86 percent of US households that subscribe to cable or satellite, the DTV transition does not impact their ability to watch TV.”