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Thanks for the very useful comments, Ed!

Indeed, the focus on this post was on OECD experience -- this was meant as a sort of rough complement to earlier posts on mobile phone use in developing countries.

When speaking of the use of mobiles phones to aid teacher professional development in developing countries, you ask: "Got an examples?" I wish I did! What I do have are collections of anecdotes and hearsay and earnest intentions, but nothing concrete that I can cite, beyond what I mentioned in this previous post --. http://blogs.worldbank.org/edutech/videos/mobiles-0.
(Text2teach is an example of a 'one phone per cassroom' model -- Boying takes this model to task in a comment to the blog posting).

One place I would turn to to find such examples is the mobile application database that Ken Banks keeps on the kiwanja.net site --> http://www.kiwanja.net/database/kiwanja_search.php (http://mobileactive.org would be another resource), but this isn't too helpful on this count.

Another reason why teacher professional development may be a useful area to explore is, of course, because teachers are more likely than students to have their own phones. I find it interesting that, while there are many large scale programs to promote PC ownershp in developing countries (I used to maintain a list of a few of these here --> http://infodev.org/en/Publication.108.html), I am not aware of similar government-sponsored programs to support mobile phone ownership. My hypothesis has always been that governments haven't felt the need to intervene in this area because so many consumers all around the world (even in quite poor communities) see such an immediate value to mobile phone use that no further incentives are required to promote ownership.

With less money needed to fund hardware roll-outs, then, might investment dollars building off the growing infrastructure of increasingly powerful, (almost) always-connected 'computers in your pocket' that mobile phones are becoming bring about tangible results more quickly than those that rely on first buying more expensive PCs and laptops?

One can certainly imagine scenarios where this might be the case. If only I had some concrete examples to cite for you ...