OK so it’s a no brainer. The mobile web is growing and judging by my pool of friends (who I believe make up a great user cross section) it’s only going to be more readily adopted.
I’m not going to try and predict where we are heading with mobile internet but I feel it’s important to list out 3 very important factors which will make the mobile internet “tip”:
1. speed: the mobile internet is still too slow…OK we can deal with maps and email and stock quotes but really we want rich internet based applications delivered at high speed. Vodafone in the UK have doubled their mobile broadband speed in recent months up to a theoretical maximum of 14.4 MB. Theoretical maximums are rarely achieved but this is a positive step in allowing the delivery of rich browser based experiences. Speed must not only be delivered but it must be widely available. It’s still by and large only the developed nations who have high speed mobile networks…countries such as India have not even started their 3G spectrum auctions!
2. browser power: following on from above the power is in the browser. OK the iPhone app store has done extremely well. Full kudos to Apple in carving out this now not so niche market but in order to attract developers you need to go to their playing fields i.e. standard industry adopted development tools and languages I’m talking about Javascript, CSS, HTML..AJAX. These technologies are all delivered via the browser…so why are we asking developers to come into the walled garden? OK so I said I wasn’t going to make any predictions…I lied. The future of rich mobile internet usage will be delivered via the browser NOT platform specific applications
3. mobile usability: I’m lucky enough to use most of the new handsets which hit the market and I rarely come across devices which have an easy to use mobile interface. I’d say I’ve been learned into using the iPhone which has now paved the way for how I expect certain other mobile operating systems to behave such as Android. I feel the issue is that a lot of mobile device manufacturers are centred so closely around engineering that they fail to really think broadly on how users will interact with the services. E.g. moving geo location details from the maps application to video”
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/admob_reports_on_mobile_webs_explosive_growth.php