comScore / In-Stat / Opera Software
A mini-flurry of research out this week adds to the growing pile of information on how people are using mobile devices. So, in no particular order, here’s what we’re learning:
You’ll be shocked, I’m sure, to find we check e-mail on our phones. Seriously, the news here is that the number of users checking Web-based e-mail declined last year by about 6 percent, while the number of users checking e-mail via a mobile device grew 36 percent. Here’s one reason why that matters: How do your e-mail newsletters look on a mobile device?
Next up: Shopping on mobile devices continues to grow. Opera’s monthly State of the Mobile Web report looked at changes in how users of the Opera Mini browser interacted with Amazon.com over the year. (Opera Mini is a Web browser used by 85.5 million users worldwide on a wide variety of mobile phones.) Such traffic to Amazon.com grew steadily throughout the year, especially in the U.S., with traffic spikes on Black Friday and shopping days in December that mirrored desktop-based Web use.
If you’re doing any e-commerce, you should be thinking about mobile shoppers:
“Improved mobile platforms and sites that more strongly consider multiple screen sizes have helped users to further embrace mobile shopping.”
The third bit of interesting research is on tablet use. The research firm In-Stat has released a report that suggests the “top three ranked uses for future tablet owners as e-mail, personal information management, and multimedia consumption (audio, video and gaming).” No surprises there, really.
An interesting tidbit from the In-Stat survey is that over half of the tablet owners surveyed spend at least nine hours a week on their device. As publishers develop tablet-specific products, they need to remember how much people use those devices to consume multimedia.
