Russ on: Browsing as the mobile data killer app

In ‘Browsing: The Mobile Data Killer App’, Russ reports on a presentation from Nokia on smartphone usage data.

The key takeaway for me was that browsing is the number one (by far)
mobile application that uses data, and interestingly, carrier decks
only account for 50% of the traffic. That’s great! That means people
are actually going outside the gardens and hitting other sites.

I have been following Nokia’s studies of smartphone users since the study started (I was on the Series 60 team back then). There was a lot of interesting usage patterns coming out of it, most of it positive, such as this browsing data point (BTW, correct me if I’m wrong, the packet based messaging in the figure does not include SMS, which is not packet, right?). Basically, smartphone users use a lot of stuff in addition to voice.*

Russ says also:

I think this trend is only going to continue as mobile browsers get
better, screens get higher resolution, and network speeds get faster. … Lots of people have even used their mobile browser to
access their email via a webmail account. That’s very cool – and points
to the idea that people continue to fall into similar patterns. They
*could* set up their phone to access email directly, but they’re most
likely used to getting their mail via a web interface.

This smartphone data is indeed a suggestion of where this is all heading. I think smartphones will eventually be the basic phones of the future and I do think we will see an upsurge in data usage just due to that alone (I don’t think it’s just a power user thing).

On the flip side, I think we already have enough capability in the phones to have compelling browsing-based services on regular phones. I am one of those who has stopped using my phone’s email client. I use Gmail for personal mail and we use Nokia one for our internal browser-based email interface.

And further:

I personally think there is a massive vacuum right now in mobile-focused web sites. The numbers are clearly showing there’s a growing trend for people to access sites remotely, sites need to really get up to speed in making their existing content more mobile friendly, and to do something innovative and compelling for those mobile browser users who may have different use cases for the information they’re trying to retrieve.

Oy! Oy! A bunch of us have been saying this for some time now, including Russ. The market is ripe for the picking and those of us who know how to integrate the Web with mobiles will be having a fun year. Oy! Oy!

*Incidentally, I have also seen complementary data suggesting that data service users in general are high users of all data services, so this smartphone thing could get even bigger than these results suggest.