Mobile Internet takes off
The mobile Internet has been with us a long time - and has long delivered a lot less than it has promised. But, according to new figures, it looks like the mobile Internet is finally taking hold.
02 December 2008
In our last e-mail newsletter, we said that ‘the mobile Web is literally waiting in the wings’. It now looks like the waiting is over!
To say that the first mobile version of the Internet, delivered courtesy of WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) in the late 1990s, was a disappointment would be rather an understatement. Finding that the promise of ‘the Internet on your phone’ really meant the Web equivalent of Teletext, delivered at excruciatingly slow speeds, turned the initial hype into ridicule. Few could see the point, and those that did weren’t happy with the results.
What people really wanted was what had been initially promised – the Internet on your phone. The real Internet – not a cut down version, and delivered at broadband speeds. So, we had to wait well over a decade before technologies such as 3G and mobile browsers from Opera, Apple and Microsoft gave us what we wanted.
The biggest change has actually been in the last year or so. Love it or hate it, the iPhone has rewritten the rules of what a mobile device should be. In many ways, it’s more of a computer with a phone added on – in stark contrast to most phones, which are phones first with computing features added. But trying to use a diary or e-mail client via a phone’s numeric keypad is like trying to tap dance on ice.
We got a whole raft of PDAs, from HP, Dell and the like – and they weren’t bad. But you still needed a separate phone, giving you two devices to lump around. Smart phones with Windows embedded showed promise, but weren’t robust enough by a long way – we’d all (for some reason) come to expect our PCs to crash now and again, but we didn’t want that kind of behaviour from a phone.
The good news is that companies such RIM, with its Blackberry, were taking the mobile Internet more seriously – but more from an e-mail perspective than providing a usable mobile Web browser. But they were successful, especially as a corporate tool. Then along came the iPhone, which provided the Internet with remarkably little compromise. It had real HTML display of Web pages, via WebKit – although it was (and, at the time of writing, still is) lacking support for Flash. With solid support for JavaScript, using the Web was pretty much as good as it can get on a screen just a few inches across. E-mail was good too – but initially lacking support for Exchange, rendering the iPhone initially useless as an enterprise tool.
But the iPhone’s success is without doubt, and it’s helped to shake the market down even further, moving smart phones from niche to mainstream in the process. Microsoft is kicking its Mobile Windows into a higher gear, RIM is improving its products even further, Google has given us a real competitor to the iPhone in Android – all in all, very interesting developments indeed.
These developments are shaking down into real changes in Internet usage. After its introduction, the iPhone quickly became the most used mobile device querying Google. That’s a real indication that even though the mobile Internet was available, it wasn’t being used that much.
In the UK, the number of people accessing the Internet from mobile devices has skyrocketed – in Q3 of this year alone, usage over and above Q2 has gone up 25%. That’s a staggering increase in one quarter. Much of the growth of people accessing the Internet is now coming from mobile devices, according to research company Nielson Online.
In the UK, that’s now an audience of 7.5 million people – all accessing the Web via mobile devices. BBC’s news site is the most popular site, with an audience of around 1.7 million people – interestingly, the BBC’s news site has shown a commitment to mobile users for a long time, and has stuck to it and developed it as technology has changed.
Mobile users tend to be younger, too – though the figures for older users, even the over 55s, aren’t too shabby – 12% of mobile Internet users are in that senior bracket.
All of this shows one thing: that the mobile Internet is finally here, finally mainstream – and is growing fast. People are finding that their phone is enough to give them what they need, with access to the Web, news, e-mail and even Facebook being handier from a phone than it is from a PC.
