What are the interesting (exciting) trends in how young Italians are
using mobile-phones?  Ideally something to do with content or
services, rather than just communications and messaging.  My client is
a sports company launching a mobile-portal in Italy, and they want
some interesting, characterful info about the marketplace.
Ideally the answerer will be Italian, or know the market well. 
Certainly will need to be able to read Italian.  Please supply as much
info as possible, with images if possible, and sources (incl
weblinks).

For some reason, Italy and Italian are poorly represented on GA.  Some
Researchers can get along in Italian, but there don't seem to be any
natives or highly fluent speakers active.
That may just be begging for refutation, but so much the better.
Good luck

Not a Google Answer researcher, I will therefore just post a comment.

I won't be able to get paid for this :-) so I won't be very organic or detailed.

A general look to the Italian mobile market.
The number portability that was theorically possible since quite long
only recently has become easy and feasible, and the market has become
very dynamic.

The major carriers are TIM , Omnitel vodafone, Wind and Tre

Tre (www.tre.it) has an interesting marketing strategy, concentrating
on video-capable mbile phones sold at very low prices (starting from 1
Euro) but locked to their service.

Example of their prices:

Motorola A1000 99 Euros
Nokia 6680 19 Euros
Sony Ericsson K608i 19 Euros
LG 8330 1 Euro

A secondary market of "black-market technicians" unlocking the phones
so that they are usable with any carrier has developed, with the legal
alterniative being a short trip to neighbouring Switzerland, where the
operation is done in almost every major mobile shop.

A mail-order version of this activity might be interesting, after
evaulating legalities and base of operations.

Another interesting detail in tre's marketing strategy is that the
company offers to pay the yearly state tax on cell phones (that is
usually paid by the user) if you subscribe to some of their plans.

Video-phoning is still rather expensive, and while technologically it
is very appealing the cost of these types of calls makes them seldom
usable by younger people.

The development of messaging technologies has brought a large
diffusion of SMS, with MMS (again) not being very developed because of
cost issues.

The contents market which is certainly more interesting.

Apart more conventional services (news, sports news, etc.) via SMS,
student-oriented services are going towards selling information via
SMS.

A typical example is www.studenti.it, which has opened a section
(mobile.studenti.it) that (with a pre-paid account) offers the
following services oriented towards helping students "cheat" at school

Encyclopaedia: sends back short texts on topics regarding literature, history etc.
Synonims and Antonyms: searches a theasurus
Live tutor: ask a question, a human tutor will answer in max 15 minutes
Latin translations: sending an sms with the first 3-4 words of a latin
text will result in having the translations sent back via several SMS
messages

The cost of these services varies from 30 to 70 Euro Cents per query

A strong but definitely saturated niche is selling desktops, ringtones
and games via messaging systems.

A large company wanting to penetrate aggressively the market might
find an opportunity distributing free contents (e.g. games) with
built-in support for rotating banners / ads.

Another service that might be interesting to explore would be SMS
broadcasting (a relayed many-to-many chat)

Do you have more specific questions?

Myoarin: thanks, that's interesting.  Do you work for google?  I was
curious to know what % of researchers are US-based?

Frox: thank you very much for your reply, it was useful. Especially
the studenti bit.  Do you work in the mobile industry?  it sounds as
if you might.

No, I don't work for the mobile industry, I work as an electronic
publisher, and so I had several contacts with mobile service providers
to licence them contents

Harry,
No, I don't, that comment was just based on experience here and
comments to an old question asking about Researchers' languages.  You
might read the FAQs to find out more about Researchers.  There are
several active who do not live in the States, a couple in Germany, at
least one in England, one or two in the Philippines, one in Argentina
and Canada, plus others countries, I am sure, but unless they mention
the fact, one is very unlikely to notice since their English is so
good.  I am an American living in Germany.
Nice that Frox provided an informative comment for you.
Regards, Myoarin

you can take a look at these reports (free download):

"The Netsize Guide" (download at http://www.netsize.com/?id=5&sid=1,
you can download after registration)
"24 Gennaio 2005 - Mobile VAS, è boom multimediale" (download at
http://www.osservatori.dig.polimi.it/dettaglioEvento2.php, you can
download after registration)

hope it helps
ciao