Google Mobile Statistics
There’s a thought provoking article at TechCrunch written by Vic Gundotra, Vice President of Engineering for Google’s mobile and developer products. It presents some opinions, facts and figures that you may find surprising.
For example, we are told that… "users of the T-Mobile G1 and its newer WebKit browser search Google 20 times more often than Nokia Series 60 users". While I am sure this is true, it gives the impression that S60 doesn’t have a WebKit browser which is incorrect. However, I think that people browse more on phones such as the G1 (and iPhone) because they are sold (or purchased?) as a browsing device, usually with inclusive data. Many S60 devices are sold without data plans and are viewed by users primarily as a device for making voice calls.
One Google graph I particularly found interesting was the one showing the long tail of mobile search queries…
This shows that if people are given a capable device, they will search for as wide a number of topics as they do on their desktop.
I wonder if this has any future implications for the use of richer mobile applications and richer mobile web applications. In the future, given a capable device, will people end up doing most of their computing on a mobile phone?
