I’m a Verizon girl. I love having my cable, Internet, phone, and mobile service all under one roof. If I could buy my music or groceries from Verizon, I would. What’s troubled me recently is my curiosity about and envy of those iPhone owners who have all the coolest and most useful apps and features at their fingertips.

I recently began contemplating purchasing an iPhone and breaking my Verizon contract when I found out that Martha Stewart has an app. How cool would it be if, while frantically racing down the aisles at Whole Foods trying to figure out what to make for dinner, I could search thousands of recipes and create a shopping list on my iPhone?

What’s a Verizon lover to do?

After the Wall Street Journal recently reported that Verizon is in serious talks with Apple to produce an iPhone by the end of 2010, I realized that my long wait might just be over and I wouldn’t have to betray my faith in Big Red.

What does this mean for future Verizon iPhone users?

While some diehard iPhone fans are skeptical about the compatibility of apps with Verizon, analysts say that as long as the apps work with the Apple operating system there should be no problem. However, Verizon’s CDMA wireless network doesn’t support some of the iPhone’s advertised features, such as multiple-party conference calling and the ability to let customers talk while using data.

Analysts predict that Verizon could add as many as 3.5 million new iPhone users to the market within only six months of the Verizon iPhone release. For iPhone app designers and developers this means an exponential growth in the demand for apps, as well as an increase in iPhone advertising because of the surge in users.

As the official announcement of the release date for the Verizon iPhone draws near, there will be more details and reassurance from Verizon and Apple that we’ll have all the compatibility and features that AT&T has been offering with its iPhone.

For now I can rest assured that my options will apparently remain open and I will no longer be shut out of the iPhone experience.

Black Friday & Cyber Monday may have come and gone but the spending season has just begun and if you have an iPhone, as nightmarish as it may seem, every minute of every day can be Cyber WhateverDay.

Like the DVR did away with having to clear your schedule to make it home to watch your favorite show at 9PM, dedicated shopping apps can let you shop whenever you feel like it without having to rush home to your laptop or even worse – the store.

Amazon Mobile

With about a year on the competition, Amazon Mobile has had some time to refine what was an already great app last holiday season. Being able to see an item in a b&m store, look it up on Amazon, find a better price and purchase it before you even make it back to your car is a pretty cool experience.

Best Buy

Best Buy’s app provides great interaction with their physical stores by allowing you to search inventory and reserve an item at a location close to you. I did find that I had to jump through as many hoops as I would have to on the desktop to actually place an order, which is something that the Amazon app managed to avoid. But still, being able to browse the weekly ad and see what they have on sale saves you a little time digging through the newspaper and a bunch of time actually going to the store.

Target

The Target app has the most limited purchasing options of the three. You can browse anything in the store and like the Best Buy app, see the weekly ad deals, but if you want to purchase an item, you are kicked over to the full-flavor html site which really defeats the whole purpose of mobile shopping. The coolest thing the Target app does though is allow you to set your local store and not only will it tell you if an item is in stock – it will tell you what aisle you can find it in.

Mobile shopping is still in it’s infancy but the experience is really beginning to take shape. Already there are expectations forming of just how the experience should work and it’s interesting to see all the major players take a stab to see what works.

For b&m stores, location awareness, stock checking and item reservation are a must because they save customers time and pull customers into the store. For online-only stores, robust personalization options and one-click purchasing (or as close as you can get to it) are important to recreating the impulse purchase, press-a-button-and-get-it experience that has worked so well for Apple’s iTunes and AppStore.

With the recent release of the iPhone 3GS and Palm Pre, the lure to take your site mobile will be stronger than ever—but should you?

Loading up your site on a mobile browser can be a real eye-opener. In a best-case scenario, what you’re greeted with is a smaller version of the site you are used to seeing on your desktop. Although devices like the iPhone are more than capable of viewing “full” HTML websites, all that double tapping and pinching can get pretty tiresome.

The reality is that not all sites are particularly suited to having a “to go” version. Of course, there are the obvious ones—news, weather, finance—but most of these areas are pretty well served by the built-in apps on mobile devices. It takes some creativity to figure out what makes your particular business work on the go. So when considering the mobile option there are some important questions to ask:

What part of my site would be the most valuable to somebody on the go?
This could be as simple as your contact information—a mobile business card of sorts. I know I’ve been in situations where I was looking for a phone number or directions and went to a company’s homepage to find them. Sometimes this works out, and sometimes not so much. Ideally, a site will have a properly formatted phone number that becomes clickable allowing one-touch dialing. Adding in a link to your location on Google Maps will make you that much more accessible.

Am I doing email marketing?
One of the most common uses of mobile devices is for checking email. If somebody decides to follow a link in your email creative, it’s definitely at least worth a look to see what he or she would be presented with. Creating a mobile-specific landing page for your email creative could be a nice, low-impact way to experiment with incorporating mobile into your online strategy.

Could I trim my site down to just the basics and be happy with it?
Is it even possible to distill your site into small bite-sized chunks? Sites that are more information heavy, requiring users to spend time flipping through each section, fill out forms or pore through material in large PDFs are obviously not places somebody wants to visit on the go.

Do I want to maintain multiple versions of my site?
And you thought the early days of the web with browser-specific versions of your site were over. With browser detection and alternate CSS files used to serve up a mobile version of your site while keeping your full site intact for desktop visitors, the process is more manageable now. Still, you will have to consider the implications of any architectural changes across multiple platforms—although the statistics seem to support targeting iPhone if you just want to get your feet wet with mobile. According to Net Applications, of all mobile browsing platforms, iPhone has the largest market share with almost 65% as of May 2009. Google’s Android is in a distant second with almost 8.5%. As of this post, data still isn’t available for WebOS – the operating system use on the Palm Pre.

So is now the time to fire up the grill and get started on a mobile presence? It would seem so. At the  least it’s definitely time to start thinking about it.