Lopez Family blog

I recently had to do some research for an article on mobile web performance, so I looked up stats on mobile phones and mobile web applications. There were several angles to it, the website, the phone that was being used to reach the website and the carrier the phone used to access the Internet.

Among the things I found in my research was the fact that Nokia phones are the most popular mobile phones in the world, something like 40% of the world’s mobile phones are Nokia, just for some reference, iPhones make up 13% of the world’s mobile phones (Click here to see the report). Surprisingly when looking at phones that are used to access the internet it’s very close between Nokia and iPhone. Stat Counter is a great place for that sort of information.

Ok so you’re probably thinking that it’s not big news that the iPhone is close to being the most popular phone for accessing the web. But what I did find interesting was the fact that some web applications are aimed at particular browsers/devices. So if the visitor is using an iPhone they get one version of the application, if they use a Nokia they’ll get a different version, if you’re using your home computer yet another, etc., etc.

This sounds like a good thing, but, consider the fact that the iPhone runs a full browser but uses phone carriers to get it’s data. This means that a full application is being passed on to the phone via what is the equivalent of a DSL connection. The image of camel through eye of needle comes to mind.

I can’t go into detail of the findings since the article hasn’t been published yet but the last bit that I’ll share is that out of the four carriers that I used in my study, Sprint was the fastest and T-Mobile was the slowest. The other two were Verizon and AT&T.