A report released by analysts, Nielsen Mobile, has revealed that the use of the mobile phone to access the Internet has taken a large leap in the last two years.
Expectedly, the U.S. has the largest number of mobile Internet users, solely due to the large population of consumers. In 2006, they had 22.4 million people, using the mobile web, while now, they have about 40 million such users i.e. about 16% of all mobile users in the country.
Among the 16 countries studied in this survey, U.K. and Italy follow closely at second and third place with 12.9% and 11.9% respectively. Indonesia had the lowest number of mobile net users, with only 1.1% of mobile users, accessing the net through their mobile phones.
This gigantic leap which has occurred in the use of the mobile web, is likely to be due to a combination of factors such as, more user friendly mobile phones, which make it easier to access the net, the availability of high speed networks, and lowered costs due to the availability of various data packages offered by the companies.
In spite of the large jump in the number of mobile web users, there is still scope for further growth of this industry, as it was found that almost 95 million Americans pay for use of the mobile web, but most of them still do not use it. This may be either due to lack of interest in this particular facility, or the lack of awareness, of its availability in the various media packages they have chosen.
Nielsen Mobile has further revealed that of the users of the first generation iPhone, almost 82% use the mobile internet facility, which is 5 times higher than the likelihood of the average mobile user using this option.
The second generation iPhone promises to bring with it even better facilities.
Among other handsets, the Motorola RAZR, is the most popular in the U.S. and Nokia’s N95 is the most popular in U.K. In India China and Russia too, it is the Nokia handsets which are the most frequently used.
The most common uses of the mobile web, are to execute bank transactions, check email and socialize through the social networks. Yahoo! and Google are the most popular internet sites visited through the mobile.
However, while desktop users, visit almost 100 sites per month, on an average, mobile web users visit about 6.4 sites per month in the U.S., 5.5 sites per month in U.K. and 8.2 sites per month in Italy.
$5 billion were generated from use of the mobile web in 2007, and already $1.7 billion, have been generated in the first quarter of this year.
This growth in the use of the mobile web, is an indicator for big businesses to start investing in this as a marketing tool.
