The main feature that gets touted on the iPhone is how with touch, the iPhone is really easy to use, but that's not what sold me on the iPhone. It was actually the integration of touch + internet that pushed me over the edge on the iPhone; Safari with touch emulates enough of the experience of using a mouse in browsing the web that I often find myself using Safari more than the actual phone portion of the iPhone. The iPhone, in essence, has become my portable Google search engine, and a recent announcement by Google claiming that the iPhone generated 50 times more Google searches than any other mobile device tells me a couple of things.
- iPhone users will tend to use the default.
The first is that iPhone users use Google, because that's the default search engine on the iPhone. While they could use other search engines by using Safari and setting their browser elsewhere, most of them aren't doing this, because it involves extra steps. When you're searching, the sooner you put in what you're looking for, the sooner you'll get results back.
- iPhone users are more likely to use their mobile Internet capabilities
I can understand this -- before the iPhone, I had a Nokia 6820. This phone had EDGE connectivity and could browse the web in a somewhat rudimentary fashion, but it wasn't easy to parse out the results, and the display felt more like I was browsing through an old text-based Lynx web browser than actually surfing the internet. With the larger displays on phones currently, and better interfaces, surfing on the internet has improved, but there are still a lot of problems with browsing on phones, even on those with keyboards. I use my iPhone's internet all the time, while I'm waiting for something, while I'm wondering about something I see at the store, while I'm curious what the street address is for where I need to go, I know that most of the answers can be found on the internet, and with the iPhone with me, I know I can find those answers.
Knowing these things also tells me the inverse is probably going on too --
- People who have mobile devices that aren't the iPhone probably aren't using the internet features of their phone as often.
- Keypad-based controls for browsing aren't as convenient as touch.
Of course, there's an even simpler explanation for this: while an unlimited data plan for the iPhone is included in even the most basic of plans for the iPhone, most cell plans aren't that generous with data usage; a nickel per 50KB was my previous fee, and that definitely relegated my cellphone internet usage to the times where I actually needed it. Unlimited Data Plans have become more common, but as they are a per-phone contract option and not part of a standard package, it's an option only the most internet-addicted partake in.
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