UK Leads the Way in Mobile Email

Opera have released a report, titled ‘State of the Mobile Web‘ for the first quarter of 2008. The report has highlighted some very interesting data.

Since 1998 Opera have been working to offer a decent web browsing experience on the mobile phone. Over that time they have developed what has become the most popular web browser for mobile handsets, Opera Mini. With the increase in usage of QVGA screens on mobile phones, combined with the excellent Opera Mini web browser, surfing the internet on a mobile phone is no longer hard work. Many handsets now work on 3G data speeds with HSDPA Mobile Broadband becoming more increasingly available. This, combined with how Opera Mini, transcodes web pages to increase data transfer speeds, offers mobile users access to full websites with enhanced browsing experience as opposed to having to rely on cut down WAP or .mobi sites.

Opera Mini has been downloaded over 44 million times since its worldwide launch in 2006. In March alone, almost 12 million people used Opera Mini to surf the net, with the number of people downloading and using Opera Mini increasing by 26% just in the last quarter, compared to the previous quarter in 2007.

Page requests to the net via OM are processed through a secured server. The servers are located in several countries around the world to help improve throughput and to make sure that web pages are delivered lightning quick, by not forcing the phone to process the page information. More than 2.4 billion web pages were processed through the OM servers in March alone. In total, the number of pages viewed through Opera Mini in the last quarter grew by an astonishing 57%, over the figures for the last quarter in 2007. The average number of pages viewed by each user in March were 202.

As mobile web browsing becomes ever more popular, of course there is an increase in the amount of data transferred, and network mobile tariffs that offer an inclusive amount of browsing data are becoming as popular, and just as important, as tariffs with inclusive voice minutes and text messages. In the month of March, Opera Mini users generated more than 33 million MegaBytes of data, for mobile network operators worldwide. The total compared to the last quarter showed a growth of almost 88%.

As users become more comfortable browsing the net from their phone, they are looking more and more for full internet sites, as opposed to ‘made for mobile’ sites. 77% of all traffic goes to full websites, with just 23% going to mobile specific sites. This matches Opera’s OneWeb idea, where a user will access the same sites on a PC or on a mobile phone. The most popular sites accessed on a mobile phone continue to be Social Networking sites, which accounts for almost 40% of worldwide traffic, with some countries having almost 60% of their web traffic going to sites like Facebook and Myspace.

In the UK, the most popular sites are mobile email access sites, with 11% of the total web traffic going to sites such as Yahoo Mail and Google’s Gmail. In the top ten sites accessed, the large majority were social networking sites, with Facebook leading the way. Here is the top ten in full:

1. www.Facebook.com
2. www.google.co.uk
3. www.live.com
4. www.bebo.com
5. www.mocospace.com
6. news.bbc.co.uk
7. uk.yahoo.com
8. www.itsmy.com
9. www.faceparty.com
10. www.ebay.co.uk

You can download the Opera Mini web browser from here.

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[Source: The UK Mobile Phone Blog]