Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
Mobile Web Usage. Keeps Growing and Growing and Growing…
TechCrunch has a great article today, citing new numbers from the team over at Opera. regarding the usage of their mobile browser and how that number consistently skyrockets over the previous months number. They’re currently reporting over 35.6 million people used Opera Mini last month, serving approximately 500 million page views PER DAY. That’s a pretty staggering number. But what we find additionally a little staggering is how stunned people are by these reports.
What are the first two things that come to mind when you think of big changes over the last 10, say even 15 years. I know the first things I think of are 1. the unveiling of the world wide web (yes, yes, yes… I know someone out there is going to go off about how the whole internet thing was invented by Al Gore… I mean, originally conceived way way back when our parents were young, but I’m talking about the days of Yahoo!, Webcrawler, Mosaic, Prodigy, 50 Free AOL hours on CD and even the birth of Netscape) and 2. the real commercialization of the mobile/handheld device (hether that’s the cell phone or the PDA is somewhat irrelevant, as they were both heading to the same place anyway). So it was only a matter of time before those two things crossed paths and really got it right. We’re there right now. Today, almost every device to hit the market is utilizing some sort of real time web browser with actual modern day capabilities, and with the unprecedented growth of devices like the iPhone and the Android operating system, does it really come as a surprise to anyone that people prefer to get online from the comfort of their own palm? Its pretty straight forward. Who wouldn’t want to take something out of the den or the home office and just have it with them as they roam the mall? The entire world has come to our fingertips and that’s a pretty universal phenomenon. People of all generations are on board (yes, even my parents are popping open their little touch screen phones and pulling up Google Maps to find a restaurant on the other side of an unfamiliar town, or uploading photos to Facebook of their kids’ activities… no matter how old their kids are these days).
So why all the surprise and ’shocking reports of increased mobile usage?’ I think it has to do with how FAST it all happened. We all know how fast things move these days, but lets really look at how its changed. 2004 we had roughly the equivalent of text based browsing on tiny screens. By 2005ish we were using IE on Windows mobile to view some slightly enhanced pages. The beginning of 2007 the entire game changed and the real web (not just tiny mobile optimized text versions) were browsable via the iPhone. By the first quarter of 2009 we now had hundreds of different devices from iPhone to Nokia to HTC to Palm to Blackberry, etc etc, running modern browsers and accessing the web over 3G networks on virtually every carrier worldwide. We went from cell phone with text GPRS browsing to highspeed computer in your pocket in around 3 years. That’s some pretty impressing movement.
So yes, look at the numbers, mobile web usage is skyrocketing month after month. But does that really surprise anyone? Not here anyway.
More: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/27/mobile-web-usage-keeps-on-growing-and-growing-and-growing
