Everything is growing, everything is changing
comScore has shared the results of a study of a number of mobile markets. According to its results, in many of them, the level of mobile media use has exceeded the 50% mark.
Those who have a smartphone are becoming more and more. The time is not far off when users of simple phones will remain in the minority. Moreover, the number of those who use their gadget not only for communication is also growing rapidly.
The analytical company comScore, having conducted extensive research on a number of mobile markets (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, the USA and the UK), found that the global use of mobile media has crossed the 50% mark. In other words, those who use their device to access the network and download various applications, not to mention watching streaming video, are already more than half of the total number of mobile phone owners.
But the level of smartphone penetration is not always equal to the level of mobile media usage. For example, most of them go online from mobile gadgets in the country with the lowest ratio of smartphones to GSM phones. This country is Japan. The use of mobile media there reaches an astronomical value of 76.2%. At the same time, the smartphone penetration rate is less than in Russia – only 17%.
With sad irony, it can be noted that the active growth of the use of mobile media in Japan in the 90s led to the fact that in the land of the rising sun, up to a certain point, the old services hindered the development of the smartphone market. They just didn’t see the point in it. At the moment, the situation is actively changing: 94.1% of all devices sold are based on Android and iOS.
The correlation in the US and the UK looks more obvious. Of the total number of mobile devices, the number of smartphones is 41.8 and 51.3%, and mobile media is actively used by 55.2% and 56.6%, respectively.
Despite the growth in the use of mobile media, the Internet traffic that falls on mobile devices is still very small compared to that generated by PCs. In the USA, mobile phones and smartphones accounted for only 5.2% of traffic in December 2011, tablet systems accounted for 2.5% and “other” gadgets accounted for 0.5% of all Amrican traffic. That is, mobile devices accounted for 8.2% in total, and the rest – on PC.
comScore also noted a strange discrepancy. While Android remains the most popular platform in terms of the number of devices sold, the most popular gadgets are iPhones (the top three most popular mobile devices in the United States at the end of December looked like this: iPhone 4S, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4).
