RE: Best Practices : Some Background

Some very good stats Ray, thanks! 
 
The potential of the Mobile Web reminds me of when I spent my first two
weeks working for AOL in a porter cabin when online marketing was
quickly disregarded as "something that would never take off" - those
were the good ole days ;)
 
Paul
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Ray Anderson [mailto:ray@bango.com] 
Sent: 22 July 2005 15:57
To: Paul Walsh; 'Tim Moss'; 'Holley Kevin (Centre)'; 'Daniel Barclay';
'Barbara Ballard'
Cc: public-bpwg@w3.org
Subject: RE: Best Practices : Some Background
 

I thought it might be interesting to provide some "statistics" to put
the scale of this opportunity, and how big it already is,  in
perspective.
Perhaps as part of this project, we need to ensure that web designers
realise that there is a huge population of people out there who could
access their content on a small device - if they had something to show
them.

Here we go:

Openwave claim that there are 620,000,000 of their browsers now in
circulation (about 20% more than Internet Explorer)

Bango has seen more than 3,000,000 distinct end users visiting WAP and
xHTML sites in teh UK alone (and about another 17,000,000 worldwide.
Thats out of a subscriber base of 40,000,000, of whom (according to
operators) about 45% have visited internet sites on their phone

Sky now claim that more people visit the Sky WAP site from their mobile
than visit the fixed site from a PC.

Tagtag.com now hosts around 500,000 individual WAP sites
Peperoni now hosts over 400,000 WAP sites
M-Island in Japan has more than 6,000,000 personal i-mode sites
etc.

The UK Operators measured 1,760,000,000 WAP pages delivered to their
subscribers in April 2005. Assuming that half of subscribers 
use the Mobile Internet ( see above) thats an average of  88 pages per
person per month.  

The most common access devices are the cheaper ones.   Remember that
most young people don't have a PC, and if they did they
would probably have no way to connect to the internet (they don't have a
fixed line - only mobile).  Every month we publish a report
of the most popular handsets browsing to several thousand content
providers with a wide mix of content.  Here are the June stats:

Position Handset Percentage
1  Nokia 6230 31.33%
2  Samsung D500 9.34%
3  Sony Ericsson K700 9.34%
4  Nokia 3220 6.02%
5  Samsung E720 4.99%
6  Nokia 6610i 4.19%
7  Nokia 7610 3.83%
8  Motorola V3 3.02%
9  Sony Ericsson K500 2.96%
10  Sony Ericsson E700 2.79%
11  Sony Ericsson S700 2.78%
12  Motorola V547 2.66%
13  Nokia 6630 2.57%
14  Nokia 7250i 2.42%
15  Motorola V220 2.21%
16  Nokia 6600 2.06%
17  Samsung E330 2.03%
18  Samsun E600 1.91%
19  Sony Ericsson T610 1.80%
20  Nokia 6100 1.75%

There are less than 3 million Blackberry Subscribers.  There are more
than 700 million active WAP or iMode subscribers

700 million mobiles were sold in 2004. Almost all internet connactable.
Microsoft PDA (best seller) sold about 4.5 million,
most of which did not have internet connectivity as sold.

I think there is something BIG happening...! 


At 13:57 22/07/2005, Paul Walsh wrote:


The ultimate goal is quiet simple and I think Kevin made a very good
point (as you do too Tim!) that I'd like to expand further. A content
author should no longer continue to assume they understand the access
point used by visitors. I accept that most visitors will continue to use
a desktop PC to access the web with few using PDAs and even fewer using
smaller screens such as mobile phones - and this won't change for quiet
some time to come (I specifically use the term phone because 'device'
covers PDAs). However this will change over time with more people
accessing the web using smaller screens like mobile phones, and the MWI
BP is looking to provide guidance on how to reach the full potential of
the Web by demonstrating how to author Web content in the best possible
way for optimum performance on small screens - not just for mobile
phones, although this is the primary focus. There are some limitations
and these are covered below.