Photo: Andréia on Flickr.
It's the story we expected to see: the iPhone is driving use of the mobile internet. With unlimited data tariffs and that touchy-touchy big screen, that was always the point.
But the really interesting niblet from this post by the New York Times is that on Christmas Day (presumably when everyone had unwrapped them) Google saw more traffic from iPhones than from phones with Nokia's Symbian operating system: even though iPhones have an estimated 2% share of global smart[phones compared with Symbian's 63% share.
Microsoft's Windows Mobile has an 11% share and BlackBerry 10%.
Yahoo confirmed the trend, saying iPhones accounted for a disproportionate amount of its mobile traffic, as did advertising network AdMob, which also saw a traffic surge from iPhones around Christmas.
Google were quick to tailor their services for the iPhone, rolling out a version in early December called 'Grand Prix' that offered a search home page with quick links to email, calendar and reader. A new version is due today.
The search giant's vice president for mobile products, Vic Gundotra, said the standard of mobile web browsers has been "terrible" until now, but that the iPhone would be a boon to mobile web developers.
As seems to happen every year, plenty of people predicted that 2008 would be the year of mobile. But this year I think it really might happen, with the iPhone driving a new sense of competitiveness and enthusiasm among handset manufacturers, operators and, hopefully, content providers.
Source: New York Times
Technorati Tags: Apple, Google, iPhone, AdMob, Yahoo
