BBC reports on the fast growth of mobile internet usage.
Mobile internet use is growing while the number of people going online via a PC is slowing, analyst firm Nielsen Online has found.
Some 7.3m people accessed the net via their mobile phones, during the second and third quarters of 2008.
This is an increase of 25% compared to a growth of just 3% for the PC-based net audience – now more than 35m.
One thing which the survey also found was:
It also found that the mobile net audience was younger and searched for different things.
What this demonstrates is that our learners will be (or already are) using mobile devices to search for things on the internet.
Our learners will also as a result be more likely to utilise their mobile devices to access college web services, so we should ensure that ours are accessible from a mobile device.
I have not seen this report in full but I suspect that the figures are slightly skewed.
Thousands of laptops (and desktops) have been issued to pupils under the Computers for Pupils scheme. The vast majority of these are using 3G for connectivity. I suspect that these are included in the report’s data when in reality they do not reflect ‘mobile’ access but simply access from a laptop or desktop (mostly at home) using a 3G dongle.