Earlier this month, M:Metrics celebrated their 3rd anniversary; happy birthday M:Metrics. With it they released an interesting set of metrics that compares the last three years of device capabilities and growth:
At launch, the mobile content sector was young and promising, with expectations high but device capabilities low. For example:
United States Subscriber
Penetration: Device CapabilitiesDevice Capability
JAN 2005
JAN 2008
Growth Rate
3G
—
25%
¥
Cameraphone
14%
63%
4.5x
Smartphones
2%
7%
3.5x
Browser (WAP 2.0 or HTML)
22%
75%
3.4x
Video Playback
18%
60%
3.3x
“Over the past three years, we have seen a significant evolution in device capabilities and adoption of significantly more capable handsets by mobile subscribers, which have been key drivers of increased use of the mobile medium,” said McAteer.
With 54.2 million subscribers, 3G penetration grew from virtually nothing to 25 percent subscriber penetration from January 2005 through January 2008 in the United States. Smartphone growth followed a similar trajectory.
Growth in penetration jumped by a factor of 3.5 from January 2005, when only 2.9 million people owned a phone running the Windows, Symbian, Palm, RIM or Apple operating system, to the same period three years later. Today, 14.3 million people own a smartphone, and smartphone users account for over 25 percent of all mobile Internet consumption.
ceo
[Source -- M:Metrics]
I frankly don’t believe the numbers. All Sprint devices sold as of 2001 had browsers. 2005 is of course 4 years later and only a small number would have been browserless. Thus these numbers suggest that in the US, only Sprint devices had browsers. Cingular, Verizon, Nextel, and T-Mobile would have made up the other 78% of the market, and none of these would have had browsers.
Use is a different story, but I doubt that video playback was more popular than getting the weather.
Do you know their actual methodology?
If I recall correctly, they do actual surveys as in talking to people.
Each row is independent (don’t compare rows). What they are saying for video is that in 2005, 18% of the people surveyed used video playback vs. 60% in 2008. For browsers, in 2005 22% of the people surveyed used browsers vs. 75% today. The numbers look OK to me; bottom line is that adoption is increasing quite a bit, and use of handset capabilities is increasing as well (beyond voice).
ceo