It’s unclear to me whether these statistics are for all phones or just so-called smartphones. I’m guessing that it’s smartphones given that BlackBerries are as high as they are. These stats are cited by NY Times citing Gartner:
i. Symbian (Nokia) – 52.4% of market – apps are in Java and Flash technology.
ii. BlackBerry – 16.5% – technology?
iii. Windows Mobile – 13.9% of market – technology for app dev?
iv. iPhone – 9.6% of market – Cocoa apps.
v. Notably missing in this analysis, Android
Windows Mobile is releasing 6.5 this year. Everybody is announcing an App Store a la Apple:
i. Google’s Android market at Android.com/market
ii. Nokia’s Ovi.com – launching in the spring.
iii. and SkyMarket for Windows, not yet live.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/17/technology/17soft.html?ref=technology
Tags: android, blackberry, iphone, ovi, skymarket, statistics, symbian, windows mobile
Here’s the latest usability report on mobile: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/mobile-usability.html
How does this compare with what we’re doing?
I just read it this morning as well. We are moving in those directions. We’ll have one separate mobile site. Our goal is to reduce download times by downsizing or removing images.
I think if it makes sense for a client’s service, we can offer the mobile site idea. It hasn’t been too much work so far to re-shape the site for mobile users.
I’d agree that just about every “normal” website is incredibly hard to use on the iPhone. You have to zoom in to be able to read the text on the screen, and then there’s so many links that it’s almost impossible to put your finger down to scroll around without accidentally hitting a link. When it comes to getting news I usually go to Reuters or CNN over SFGate because they have mobile-only sites.
Try looking at these sites and imagine you’re doing it from a teeny tiny phone.
http://us.mobile.reuters.com/mobile/m/Home
http://m.cnn.com/
http://www.sfgate.com/
Hey, is that an iPhone user that is not drooling over “full Web browser on the phone”?
I use mobile.sfgate.com.
For our site, we are planning on a single mobile website targeted to the “smartphone” category (i.e., my phone, with 240×320 resolution, which is one of the most popular resolutions).
Oh, it’s nice to have a full browser, but often (as the usability report states) it’s just too slow to load all the CSS, JS and images over the cell network.
I am amused by this entire conversation.
Lynx and “text only” links keep popping into my head.
There are some Old Guys in Amateur Radio that still have sites with Text Only links and some that don’t have images at all. Seems that the OGs are so far behind that they are ahead of the curve.