On Technology and the Future: Education, IoT, AI, Mobility, Games

Tag: mobile internet

iPhone Dominates the Mobile Web (as yet)

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On 03/03/2009

The iPhone has a meagre 1.2% share of the overall phone market. However, it has true worker bees as users. No, honestly, these guys are sooo much busier than everybody else: they produce a whopping 2/3 of the world’s mobile web traffic, or so says a report. Yes, that’s right. Number 2? Shared between open-source-newbie Symbian and – remarkably – Android with 6.15% each, which is, erm, less than 10% of what the iPhone accounts for (and in spite there being a gazillion more Symbian-powered phones out there than iPhones). Next one in the queue then is Blackberry with 2.24%.

Interestingly, the researchers find that the runners-up are quickly gaining market share, which begs the question (again) if the iPhone was only a big marketing coup: did people only need the Jobs magic in order to be shown what they could actually do with their phones (and, yes, did operators need Mr Jobs vision to realize that fair use might exceed, like, 137 kb per month)?

The answer? No! 4,000 downloads per minute are more than a marketing fluke! That web traffic is not a mirage! What the iPhone did do is trigger a stampede towards better usability, better discovery, a better environment, more ease. It is no surprise that the Google-dominated Android phone is catching up so fast (in spite being the youngest platform): Google itself has a knack for simplicity and ease of use. And from the platforms that have been around for a little longer, Blackberry (traditionally equipped with flat-rate data plans and affluent users to go with it) and Symbian (highest install-base on smartphones) are best suited from the pack to catch up quickest. The only question is the one for Windows Mobile (ooh, and Mr & Mrs Gates children are not allowed iPhones…).
The most encouraging bit of that report is therefore not another staggering stat on the iPhone but that the others are catching up. A race to the top then (even if some say that, content-wise, it currently is a race to the bottom; I’m sure that that will sort itself out fairly quickly but of this another time…).

Mobile Internet is Reality!

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On 25/02/2009

A Nielsen survey commissioned (sic!) by backhaul specialists Tellabs found that the mobile Internet is pretty much a part of life nowadays – at least in the territories covered by this. They asked 50,000 consumers in EU5 (Germany, France, UK, Spain and Italy) and the US about their intentions with respect to 10 mobile data services. 

Italians are the quickest adopters, and Germans are slowest. 
The top 5 data services were (in order of ranking):  Mobile Internet, MMS (yes, really. I am skeptical, too), uploading photos, Software/app download (presumably includes games) and E-mail.

Here are some of the findings:

  • Mobile Internet usage will ignore the global recession and ramp up significantly in the next 12 months.
  • 71% of consumers anticipate daily use but concerns remain over – you guessed it – cost, speed and quality of service.
  • There are c. 200m mobile data users in the surveyed markets (which by my count equates to about 1/3 of the total population).  More than 50% of these users plan an increase of their usage in the next 2 years.
  • 25% of the users who do NOT currently use data services, plan to do so shortly (this would be another 100m).
This would all suggest that the recent signs of an accelerated move into smarter phones is actually being underpinned by the respective service use. Anecdotally, this was always known: the more sophisticated the handset, the higher consumption.
What is still worrying is the concerns over cost, etc. Carriers do move increasingly into flatrate data plans but their varying degrees of interpretation as to when a rate is flat (or rather what constitutes fair use) still leaves consumers cautious (and, frankly, as long as a few MB of data constitute the cap of fair use, this is likely to remain like this; not good…).
So all good! Even if Tellabs have a somewhat vested interest in this: they make their money with backhaul and service reliabity, a firm as reputed as Nielsen will not have cooked the numbers on this!   

No more Landlines

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On 18/09/2008

In OEM

According to research firm Nielsen (whose mobile arm incorporates what was previously known as Telephia), more than 20m household in the US (0r 17%) have ditched landlines in favour of mobile (or as they would call it cell) phones. It signifies a rather steep increase.


Here’s the highlights of a white paper they published on the issue (which you can download here):

– U.S. cord cutters tend to have lower income-levels—59 percent have household incomes of $40,000 or less.
Smaller households, with just one or two residents, are more likely to cut the cord than larger households.
– Moving or changing jobs are the biggest life events associated with cord cutting: 31 percent of cord cutters moved prior to cord cutting and 22 percent changed jobs.
– Wireless substitutors tend to use their mobile phones more than their landline peers, 45 percent more per phone, but still save an average $33 per month in a household of one subscriber, less $6.69 for each additional wireless resident, when they cut the cord.

Now, what I do find surprising is not the fact but rather the apparent reasons given for “wireless substitution”. It is cost…

On data, Nielsen also speculates:

“Landline wireless substitution may just be the start. […] As wireless data networks improve and speeds become more and more competitive with broadband, some consumers may cut the Internet cord, as well, favoring wireless data cards and other access through carrier networks.”

Now this I understand, and the study shows indeed that wireless-only consumers use the mobile Internet more than twice as often as their primary access to the web than the good old-fashioned rest (11% vs 5%). It will be interesting to see how quick this substitution works though for the masses: people with money tend to retain their landlines, which suggests that a wireless-only solution is still less convenient. With hardware (computers, phones, etc) becoming increasingly able to access multiple wireless standards (i.e. via the mobile networks as well as WiFi, etc), this factor might however be evaporating relatively quickly.


ESPN Mobile gets 4.9m hits in 24 hours (10% more than on PC site)

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On 07/01/2008

MoCoNews points us to an article reporting about some noteworthy stuff on the usage of the revamped ESPN Mobile (you will recall that the full-blown MVNO they had tanked horribly and the service was then re-launched as a mobile internet destination). They (well, not they but “an executive briefed on the data”) said that for one 24-hour period, ESPN’s wireless NFL section, with 4.9 million visits, topped the PC NFL section’s 4.5 million visits. And that’s impressive!

In the same article, M:Metrics was quoted to point out that it was convenience that did the trick, and this is of course where the data might be a bit distorted (it might not be but it’s unclear): ESPN Mobile is available in two flavours. ESPN MVP is exclusively to Verizon high-end data subscribers who get it for free. So this basically supports the case that the mobile internet will become a fully-fledged “competitor” to the “old” internet once bandwidth and cost for bandwidth will be similar to the internet proper; and that is not a big miracle, is it? The normal ESPN Mobile is available to anyone but may be subject to data charges. It would be interesting to know the shares the two sites/apps have in the above data.

But I don’t want to divert from the fact that 4.9m mobile hits inside 24 hours is great by any measure. Sport is a wonderful starting point for mobile internet usage anyway as it is so time-sensitive (it is not really the same thing to record a live game and then watch it hours later after the city is steeped in the team colours already) and people all over the world are so passionate about their favourite sports and teams. Great stuff, surely!

Yahoo follows suit: presents development platform for mobile

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On 07/01/2008

After all the buzz in the back-end of last year over the Google-led Open Handset Alliance and their Android OS, Yahoo! has now presented its own view on how to reduce the complexity within the mobile landscape by announcing a development platform for “mobile internet applications”.

It is, alas, not the full bag of tricks: Unlike Android, which is of course basically an OS, the Yahoo! scheme only foresees tools to allow the creation of widgets to run under the company’s Yahoo! Go mobile service or in any mobile web browser. This means that “mobile internet applications” in Yahoo speak do not include “classic” mobile applications (developed in J2ME, BREW, Symbian, etc, and then downloaded to a user’s phone), and the latter will not benefit from the initiative.

The question (and this may well be one of the big ones for 2008) is therefore if the (short) age of downloadable applications is already dawning. Because, unlike the Internet, mobile is a cluttered space with a gazillion operating systems and middleware layers on even more different devices competing for market share. Ease to port applications at least across handsets and ideally also across operating systems is therefore the crucial factor. Only if downloadable applications (including indeed a software package like Yahoo! Go) really are displaced by the mobile internet proper would this change.

Commentators note that Yahoo! Go is not normally available on handsets as most tier-1 operators will (and apparently each and every US carrier currently does) simply remove pre-installed applications prior to delivery to customers. However, this does not seem to matter too much as far as the new initiative is concerned as it is said to run on every browser, too. It may take away from discovery and therefore usage so this is where it appears to chip away on the benefits: Whilst the Yahoo! move would seem the much less complex initiative compared to Google’s attempts to take on the OS heavyweights, it comes at the cost of lower usability for users and also less actual benefit for developers: why would you develop for that platform if visibility, discovery, usage and therefore commercial reward are foggy at best?

I’m not convinced (yet).

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