M:Metrics has released a report that looks at patterns of mobile content consumption in Europe and the US. Sports was the most popular genre in Europe, with Weather being the most popular among US consumers. News content is in second place in both regions.

The differences in content preference were, perhaps not surprisingly, more strongly linked to gender than to region. Below is a chart which shows the most popular content genres by gender for the US consumers.

One very large difference in mobile phone usage between regions is in use of SMS. In the 5 European countries surveyed, the percent of subscribers who had sent an SMS ranged from 72.2% in France up to 86.7% in the UK. By contrast, only 41.1% of US subscribers had sent a text message.

On the other hand, the percent of Americans who had purchased a ringtone, 9.3%, was roughly twice that of the Europeans.

The press release has a lot more detailed information, including data broken down for each individual country. See the entire M:Metrics press release here.