Opinions are like the nose on your face – everyone has got one. In the mobile world opinions seem to change on a regular basis so in this blog I’m not even going to proffer one save only to say the stats are getting bigger and more impressive as time creaks forward. So in keeping with the predilection for bite size pieces of information here we go then:-

Mobile apps (Juniper Research) The global market for mobile applications is expected to more than triple from just under $10 billion at the end of 2009 to $32 billion in 2015. By the end of April 2009, Apple had confirmed that downloads from their App Store (to iPhone and iPod Touch combined) had just passed 1 billion; by early-April 2010, this number had exceeded 4 billion.

Mobile email (via Email Marketing Reports) An October 2009 report from the Radicati Group suggested there were 139m mobile email users in 2009.  This number is predicted to rise to over 1bn by the end of 2013.  A Litmus report from February this year gave the iPhone a 4% share of the email client market, making it the sixth most popular client overall.

Mobile video (Nielsen) The 20.3m people who watch mobile video in the U.S. spend an average of 3 hours, 37 minutes each watching video on a mobile phone.  The age group watching mobile video for the longest time (as in hours spent) via their smartphones are those aged 12-17 who watch 7 hours, 13 minutes per month on average with the next being the 18-24 age group with 5 hours 47 mins.  Users aged 25-34 are the largest group in the mobile video audience at 29%, while more males (55%) than females (45%) watch mobile video.

Mobile internet usage (comScore) 14m people in the UK used their mobile browser to access the internet in October 2009 and more than 18m people were using apps by the end of 2009.

Mobile internet (Essential Research) 76% of UK mobile phone users aged 16+ are not accessing the internet via mobile phones, 60% of UK mobile phone users aged 16+ claim not to even own a mobile with internet access, and just 30% of these non-owners are interested in getting an internet-enabled mobile phone.  Only 10% of mobile phone owners access the mobile internet via their phones daily and 15% do so at least once a week.  Something for the marketers then – 42% of mobile internet users earn over £40,000 a year (household income) compared to 31% of non users.  Daily users are also significantly more likely to spend more on their monthly mobile bills – 55% pay over £30 a month compared to 10% of non-users.

US mobile internet usage (eMarketer) eMarketer predicts that the number of US mobile users accessing the internet will jump from 73.7m in 2009 to 134.3 million in 2013.

Worldwide mobile internet usage (Gartner) Mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common web-access devices worldwide by 2013.  It’s estimated that the combined installed base of smartphones and browser-equipped enhanced phones will surpass 1.82 billion units by 2013, eclipsing the total of 1.78 billion PCs by then.

Not altogether surprising then but always nice to know.

Peter Richards
July 2010