There is a higher possibility in European mobile users to use their cell phones to access the Internet than American mobile users.
As per a new research by comScore, Europeans have a higher possibility of accessing the Web from their cell phones than US mobile phone users. 29 % of European Web users in Germany, France, Italy, UK & Spain regularly use their cell phones to access the Internet in comparison to just 19 % in US.
Germany & Italy have the top mobile phone Web penetration rate in Europe with 34 % each. France takes the second spot with 28 % followed by Spain (26 %) & UK (24 %). Nokia mobile handsets are most popular among European mobile Web users having 50 % market segment in Italy & 22 % in France, compared to just 17 % market share in USA, where Motorola tops the chart with 26 %.
The kind of websites being accessed differs in both the regions. Web portals such as Yahoo, MSN & Google dominate US market having 74 % mobile traffic. In Europe, popularity of web portal is highest in Italy (34 %), followed by UK (31 %), Germany (29 %), Spain (28 %) & France (24 %).
The study also revealed that men are more likely to access the web through their cell phones than women. 55 % of mobile phone users that were surveyed were men.
"The combination of wireless technology and mobile computing has also opened up new vistas for the educational world. The annual rate of growth for the shipment of wireless internet-capable devices is predicted to be 15.5 % over the next few years, resulting the statistics to reach the figure of 880 million units in 2007," according to the report "Emerging Mobile Wireless Technologies - Road to a Wireless World" published by RNCOS.
As Americans are comparatively more on the move than Europeans counterparts, they prefer readily available Internet on their computers, which may answer, to some extent, the reason for low mobile web penetration in US.
An interesting observation was the number of hits to News websites through cell phones. It was nearly negligible & non-existent in Germany. Only Italy & Britain users made visits at News websites, which outnumbered the hits to Commerce websites. The fact raises a question that what kind of websites are actually being surfed through mobile Internet.
Related Market Research Reports:
3G Market Outlook (2007-2010)
European Mobile Market Scenario to 2012
Europe Mobile Handset Market Analysis (2007)
