The nation goes mobile
According to the Office of National Statistics, (ONS), there has been significant changes over the past 12 months in the way the UK accesses the internet. 45% of the country's internet users accessed the net using some form of mobile technology in the past twelve months.
Use of mobile technologies has been by far the biggest growth area in the past couple of years. ONS estimates that there are now 17.6 million people using mobiles to access the net in the UK, compared to around 11.6 million users in 2010 and 8.5 million in 2009.
There are clear demographic patterns in this data. In the 16-24 age group, around 70% regularly use mobiles to access the internet, whilst at the opposite end of the scale, less than 10% of over-65s are using mobile web browsing. That is probably a short term trend though. In the longer term, expect to see mobile usage more closely reflect the demographics of the market in general.
Both entry-level cost and usage charges have been an issue but in the run-up to Christmas expect to see the mobile companies pushing good deals on smart phones. One product of note is the latest offering from Orange, dubbed the "San Francisco". This is being launched as a £99 Android handset for pay as you go users, and will, of course, be available as an option on contracts too. Another indicator of falling prices is the retailer play.com which is currently offering the unlocked Sony Ericsson Experia for £100, and the Samsung Galaxy Gios, another Android handset, for as little as £120. You can still pay up to £500 for the latest releases and top end models, but with Android phones at least, price is less of an entry barrier.
Website owners cannot afford to ignore this trend, and website designers should have known about these trends years ago. Websites which treat the screen like a TV set will struggle to transfer to mobiles, as will sites which have quirky non-standard navigation systems or which are optimised for one screen size or browser, but the browsers built into the modern mobile do an amazing job of translating websites to fit on the smaller screen, and in our experience, sites which were built to standards and which are light on graphics, rich on information, work incredibly well on the mobile platform.
ONS Report (PDF)
www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171778_227158.pdf
27th September 2011
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.