Mobility & GUIs - Tabs? Icons?

To summarize this article, people prefer to type things into the address bar (on mobile phones), as compared to using Tabs or favorites.

This poll may be about browsers, but i suspect it has some relevance to application design too.  To be specific, the use of tabs on the GUI (vs. pull downs, favorites, icons, etc.)

Personally, I think traditional tabs are somewhat painful on a screen (I'm picturing people poking at little tiny tabs on the screen, and hitting the wrong one), but perhaps bigger tabs, or tiles, or some such?  

Which brings me to the next point - I suspect that tabs and icons kinda converge at the extreme when we talk about mobile devices.

Now, on iPads, I suspect the design philosophy changes (tabs will work)

Why the Windows Phone browser has no tabs. Should it?

Microsoft's newest Windows Phone browser, coming soon via the Mango software update, shows improvements, but tabs aren't part of the redesign. The small screen of a smartphone limits what controls can... (more...)