The iPhone is one of the most talked about mobile handsets ever released. Searching for iPhone in Google returns around 326 million entries and entire industries have been created around iPhone websites, applications and accessories. The Apple logo was always going to guarantee its success given the following this brand has build through generations of Mac computers and iPod music players but it is fair to say that the iPhone has made some significant changes to the way in which mobile devices have traditionally been used.
The innovative, high resolution touch screen, the customisable, icon based user interface, and the cut down Safari browser provide a much more intuitive and integrated user experience compared with the traditional Nokia or Sony-Ericsson menu system and browser. The real question, however, is whether these features have resulted in measureable changes in how people use the iPhone compared with traditional mobile devices, especially for mobile web browsing.
This question was the key focus of Amethon’s first Mobile Internet Insights report, a quarterly examination of trends and insight into mobile internet usage leveraging its installed base of Mobile Analytics platforms which analyse more than 100 million mobile page views per month. One of the key features of Mobile Analytics is the ability to filter traffic based on the specific handset type and with the recently launch of the iPhone 3G in Australia, we were keen to see how it is being used compared with traditional handsets.
We found that the average iPhone user consumed more than 2 MB of data per browsing session compared with the traditional mobile user with only 300 kB. A lot of this was video downloads but iPhone users are also browsing richer websites with larger pages. The final area we examined was content discovery through search. It is clear from our results that Google has a dominant position in mobile search and that this is even more pronounced with iPhone users. There are big differences between the specific version of search engine used by iPhones and traditional mobile devices. iPhone users overwhelmingly favour the desktop version of search engines while the mobile version is generally used by traditional mobile users. This is due to the fact that the iPhone Safari browser has a Google desktop search engine toolbar but this also means that search results will invariably be in the form of desktop sites rather than mobile or iPhone optimised sites. Our overall conclusions were that the iPhone has truly changed the way people access the internet from their mobile devices. They are browsing longer, looking at more pages and consuming more data, but we also believe that the iPhone will have more far reaching changes on our industry. Firstly, iPhone users will show their friends what can be done on a mobile phone which will prompt more traditional mobile users to explore the internet on their own devices. Secondly, the publicity around the iPhone will raise awareness amongst content publishers and advertisers as to the potential of the mobile device as a channel to market resulting in more compelling content and brand investment. Finally, the ‘coolness’ of the iPhone will mean that accessing the internet on your mobile phone is no longer just for geeks.
Prepared for AIMIA Mobile Industry Group newsletter. The first area we looked at was data consumption which is another metric that Mobile Analytics is uniquely able to measure. Experience from the first generation iPhone suggested that it used a lot of data and the iPhone 3G was expected to be even more data hungry.
The average page size for iPhone users was around 54kB compared with only 20kB for traditional mobile users. We believe that this is because iPhone users are browsing websites designed for desktop users rather than mobile or iPhone specific sites. For example, the home page of the Sydney Morning Herald desktop site is around 1.2 Mb of HTML, images, JavaScript and Flash, compared with around 20kb for the mobile version.
iPhone users are also browsing around 73% more pages per site than traditional mobile users and spending more than a minute more on each site.
Both iPhone and traditional mobile users show similar trends in terms of when they browse over the course of the day although there are some interesting differences. iPhone browsing outpaces traditional mobile browsing in the morning (most likely during the commute to work) but is not as pronounced during the evening. This is most likely representative of the different demographics and working patterns of iPhone owners.
During the first 2 weeks of August we found that iPhone browsing traffic was growing at an average of 9.3% per day. This is obviously from a low base given the iPhone’s recent launch in Australia and is not sustainable but the 1.7% daily growth for traditional mobile devices suggests that mobile web consumption is growing strongly in Australia.
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