Julie Ask serves eBusiness & Channel Strategy Professionals. See the full Analyst bio.
Visit Forrester.com to learn how we make eBusiness & Channel Strategy Professionals successful every day.
Follow Julie on Twitter.
Mobile Internet Usage Is Growing At A Phenom Pace ... Why?
Posted by Julie Ask on August 4, 2010
Apps dominate the mobile conversation these days for a lot of well-demonstrated reasons, but with much less fanfare, the mobile Internet — especially the frequency of its users — has taken off. I don’t mean just that ‘mobile Web use has grown’ or it’s continuing to grow at steady pace. No. The rate of growth has jumped dramatically.
In the six months between year-end 2008 and mid-2009, daily use of the mobile Internet grew from 7% to 10% for all mobile phone users. Once you narrow it down and look at smartphone owners, the growth is even more startling, as you can see in this report. Better handsets, better browsers, and faster networks have remade the mobile Internet from a novelty to a growing, and growing quickly, part of mobile users’ daily lives.
Facebook
LinkedIn
Twitter
Comments
Rapid growth in Mobile Internet
An interesting read. There are other, less obvious reasons, one being that so much more is being done server side now. Email aside, the www side of the Internet is now allowing developers to use much more complex tools to build applications capable of serving many users concurrently. Google have done this with their apps suite, though there are many more applications that users don't realise are in fact applications. Facebook is a good example of that.
If you consider the amount of memory the average or even high end mobile has, it pales into insignificance compared to even a low end laptop. Conversely, servers are becoming ridiculously powerful.
Microsoft's foray into software for mobiles is dwarfed by Android, RIM and Apple.
The bonus from a developers perspective is that phones are reacting much more like desktops or laptops, so running applications is much easier.