A family that texts together, stays together. Or at least it stays in touch better.

Today’s families with minor children are much more likely than any other household types to have cellphones and use the Internet, a study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project reports today.

The phone survey of 2,252 adults, between Dec. 13, 2007, and Jan. 13, 2008, also shows that families use those technologies to stay in touch with each other throughout the day.

“It used to be in the old Dick and Jane days, husbands went off to work, wives went off to a different job or else stayed home … and the kids went off to school,” says study co-author Barry Wellman, professor at the University of Toronto. “And not until 5:30, 6 o’clock did they ever connect.”

But now husbands e-mail wives. Daughters call moms. Sons e-mail parents.

“There’s a new kind of connectedness being built inside of families with these technologies,” says Lee Rainey, director of the project.

When Jim Daly, an editor for a Web company who lives in Alameda, Calif., wanted to call his teenage daughter down to dinner, he called her on her cellphone.

He knew she’d answer because “text message and cellphone messages are much more important” to her, says Daly, 48.

Daly is in constant contact with his wife, a freelance editor who works from home, during the day via e-mail and cellphone.

So are millions of other Americans. According to the survey:

• About 89% of married (or partnered) parents with children own multiple cellphones.

• 66% have high-speed broadband Internet connections in their homes (compared with a national average of 52%).

• 70% of couples in which both partners have cellphones contact each other daily just to say hello, 64% contact each other to coordinate schedules, and 42% of parents contact their children daily using a cellphone.

When the Internet arose, some worried that it would pull families apart, Rainie said. But for perhaps the first time, this study indicates fairly definitely that technology is bringing them together by allowing them to have constant contact, Rainie says.

Most families say technology has either helped their communication with other family members or made no difference. Very few say it has made communication worse.

For some kids, that might become a double-edged sword, but Emily Wilson, 15, of New York City loves it. “For me, it’s really easy and it’s been a big benefit. I can always get in contact with (her parents) no matter what. I’m never out of touch with them.”

For instance, when Emily was shopping for sunglasses in Manhattan, she became concerned what her mother, who was in the Hamptons, would think of them. So Emily sent a picture — via BlackBerry — of her modeling the new shades. Within seconds, her mom sent a message back: Approval granted.

Now she says she knows “I can go shopping without my mom and have her approve what I’m buying.”

Her mom, a longtime techie, loves it, too. Her husband, Fred, likes to Twitter. Her whole family stays in touch electronically.

“We’re a very close-knit family,” says Joanne Wilson. “But it takes the connection to a whole other level. There’s a constant connection.”

Not content to stand by while AT&T , T-Mobile  and Sprint  generate all the wireless hype, Verizon last week announced that it would be supporting Research in Motion’s BlackBerry Storm smartphone on its network come November.

RIM’s first touchscreen device features a “clickable” screen that the company says simulates the feel of a physical keyboard. The Storm can connect to either EV-DO Rev. A or HSPA 3G cellular networks and features 1GB of onboard memory storage and a card slot that allows for up to 16GB of additional storage.

But while Verizon (and Vodafone in Europe and elsewhere) is hoping that the BlackBerry Storm will be its own “iPhone killer,” questions remain about whether the offering can match the popular Apple consumer device in several key areas. Here’s a look at how the Storm stacks up against the iPhone in terms of call quality, data coverage, price and more.

Facebook, YouTube, MySpace era. Cyberspace is the place to be, but often not the place to be seen, for student-athletes.

For the past several years on campuses nationwide, coaches and athletic department personnel collectively have cringed at the thought of what can show up in cyberspace on those sites that demonstrates objectionable behavior by student-athletes.

“It is a hot topic in college athletic departments,” said Christine Susemihl, senior associate athletic director at Colorado State. “Even institutions that several years ago were not touching it find they have to. They at least have to have dialogue with their student-athletes.”

The broad question has become, “How to deal with it?”

Administrators at Florida State and Kentucky have issued ultimatums to their athletes to be careful what they post, according to USA Today, and Loyola University Chicago forbids its athletes to belong.

A sampling of Division I schools along the Front Range shows a variety of approaches toward dealing with such sites, though all say it is an issue they are monitoring.

At the University of Colorado, associate athletic director Ceal Barry believes putting the onus on individual sports to nudge their student-athletes toward responsible behavior is the best course.

“I feel like it’s very difficult to legislate,” said Barry, the school’s former women’s basketball coach. “We don’t have a departmentwide policy … what are you going to do, make (offenders) run laps?”

Instead, Barry said, CU’s student handbook features a section outlining guidelines on cyber activities developed by the student-athlete advisory committee. The belief was, “If it came from their peers, it would be more effective.”

In most instances, it has been. But along the way, there have been slip-ups.

Mobile executives at a Silicon Valley roundtable discussion threw down the gauntlet to Symbian, Android and other software platforms to match the impact of the iPhone.

Talking only about two weeks after the introduction of Apple’s iPhone 3G and the App Store, where third-party software for it is offered, heads of some software companies reported huge numbers of downloads and proclaimed a new day on the mobile Internet. The jury is still out on whether the open-source phone platforms coming from Google and the Symbian Foundation will be able to match Apple’s success, according to the panelists at the TechCrunch Mobile Web Wars event in Menlo Park, California, on Friday afternoon.

For example, Pandora Media began offering its Internet radio application for most other mobile platforms, through carriers, about 18 months ago, Pandora CTO Tom Conrad said. That resulted in about 12,000 paid monthly subscriptions to the service, he said.

“In six days, we had 350,000 installs on the iPhone,” Conrad said. A key factor was that the App Store let the company give away its client and support its service through ads. On other devices, Pandora has had to use carriers’ monthly subscription model, he said.

Nearly 1 million Facebook users have downloaded the social-networking company’s application to their iPhones, according to Jed Stremel, director of mobile at Facebook. And Loopt, a location-based social-networking startup, reached 100,000 iPhone downloads only about a week after the App Store opened. The average iPhone user also is 47 times as active on Loopt as those on other types of phones, said Loopt cofounder and CEO Sam Altman.

“You can make such a beautiful app, and it’s so nice to use, so quickly, on the iPhone,” Altman said.

June 9 is not far away. So what is so special about it? Well, as Gizmodo reported, “someone very, very close to the 3G iPhone launch” has confirmed that Apple will announce their new model at the WWDC Keynote on June 9th. It is the date the ‘second generation’ iPhone will be making its way in the market straight after its launch.

The first time when the 3G iPhone’s launch date rumours were creating more buzz was when the iPhones in UK and US markets went out of stock which implied that Steve Jobs was clearing the way for the advanced phone.

It seems, again according to Gizmodo, that the launch of the new phone will also come along with some new sales policies. With everything new about it, looks like Apple’s people really want to make the launch grander as in Spain, the phone will be launched on June 18th with the ‘grand opening of Telefonica’s megastore’, an Apple store-like retail outlet (yes, that’s yet another news leak by Gizmodo). And then the launch of iPhone in other markets will follow. Perhaps a new launch strategy!

So for some more ‘new-new’ new updates on the 3G iPhone, watch this space till June 9.