Of all the phone-owning consumers in the world, 31% are browsing one of the two million mobile Web domains in use today at least once a month, according to the Yankee Group. News, search and weather are the most popular destinations, but that is due in part to the fact that other mobile sties fail to deliver an optimal experience. The Yankee Group gave most mobile Web sites it studied a ranking of only 52 out of 100.
Four sites – Google.com, Google.com/m/news, Yahoo.com and MLB.com were the first sites to score above a 70 on Yankee Group’s Mobile Web Report Card, but others are making strides, the firm said. Notably, all the mobile carrier’s own mobile Web sites needed improvement. Sprint ranked the highest at 53 for being useful in helping consumers find Sprint stores, but largely out of date. Other national carriers’ sites failed to pass for ignoring any user that wasn’t their existing consumer.
The mobile browser market has been busy and crowded driven by smartphone competition from software companies like Mozilla and Skyfire that focus on desktop-like speeds and clarity competing against native browsers on Apple’s iPhone, RIM’s BlackBerry, Android and others. At 4G World this week, independent browser vendor Opera Software stepped up the competition, introducing the latest generation of its Opera Mini 5, out in beta this week.
The fifth-generation version of the popular browser includes tabbed browsing, Speed Dial bookmarks and touchscreen or keypad browsing. CEO of Opera Software Jon von Tetzchner said the browser can relieve network traffic by compressing data by up to 90%, minimizing costs for consumers that pay per byte and lessening the strain on carrier networks. The Opera Mini browser already boosts nearly 30 million users browsing more than 12 billion Web pages each month. The platform runs on Java mobile phones, ranging from smartphones to the least powerful basic handsets, Tetzchner said.
The Web is the most natural platform for a consumer to use on mobile, Tetzchner added. While it’s popular in the industry to point to Apple’s iPhone for the best in browsing for its pan and scan features, he pointed out that most people browse Safari on the iPhone over WiFi. “What people don’t realize is that they use the applications on the iPhone so muchnbecause the browser is so slow,” Tetzchner said. “Ours works well on any network…You would go to Web sites more [than using apps] if it was the same speed.”