Ever since I was working in-house during the first dot.com boom people have been talking up the mobile Internet...here we have a BBC article from 1999 with bold claims from experts saying accessing the web from your phone would be big....by 2003.
Finally, thanks to the new generation of smartphones that time might have come. There's the research that using your phone for online video generally marks the point when your phone is your primary way of surfing the Web. And then there is this piece of research from the Ofcom (the British equivalent of the FCC) Communications Market Report.
Ofcom asked different age groups which media they'd miss the most and the difference between the 25-44 and 15-24 age groups struck me (click for larger image).
For the former, they'd miss TV first, then the Internet, then their mobiles (newspapers and magazines were way down the list). For the younger age group, TV was still top but then the order was reversed. Mobiles second, Internet (via the PC) third.
That got me thinking about the impact for marketers. Surely your Web surfing habits are much more restrictive on a phone than on the computer.
My assumption was that you are less likely to go on a google voyage of discovery, but instead will go directly to whatever it is you want to do - read Facebook messages, check the sports scores or whatever.
Actually the assumption is wrong as the research doesn't support that. Or rather what it says is yes, Internet surfing habits will be narrow if the phone's functionality is narrow. But if the user experience is good enough, then the phone really can take the place of the PC. Pretty simple really.
Two pieces of research in particular make that point:
CCS Insight carried out a study of 16-35 mobile Internet users in the UK. I can't access the full report without getting out my credit card, but from what I can see for free, 70%+ of iPhone users do use their phones for web search, compared to 30-40% of other phone brand users
Similarly, according to Comscore, 80% of iPhone owners use their Safari Internet browser to access news or information, more than 4x the rate for all mobile phone users. iPhone email usage was twice that of other smartphone users, while 32.4% of iPhone users download games compared to 3.8% of all mobile phone owners
What's the difference between the iPhone and other phones? Based on what most users think, it simply does the mobile Internet job better than other handsets. It doesn't quite mimic the experience of surfing from a PC, especially given the lack of flash, but it comes close enough.
So the conclusion is that the market is surely there. It's the technology that's to a certain extent still playing catch-up. Coming back to the point about accessing the Internet on the iPhone, an article on webcredible written by the team at mobiles.co.uk says browser functionality is key:
"It'll definitely pay for manufacturers to work on their browser software more. As Apple has shown with its Safari software, it's possible to create a good online experience on a mobile phone, but it takes innovation and user friendliness to achieve."
Image - Will Lion
- Smartphones to take '70pc of Europe's mobile market' by 2012 (telegraph.co.uk)
- Modern power moms flock to smartphones (news.cnet.com)
- Survey: iPhone 3GS best selling cell phone in Japan in July (mobilecrunch.com)
- How Usable is the Mobile Web? (readwriteweb.com)
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