Mobile browsers: Here's the data

Unless you've been living under a rock, you probably know that “smart phones“ are kind of a big deal. I've seen lots of stats thrown around, but I've never been able to fully trust Neilsen net ratings. I like to look at the data on my own.

So I dove into Google Analytics and created a mobile browser segment designed to look for smart phone web browsers, and looked at the 3 month period ending Februrary 16th. There were 586 mobile visits in that period.

Here are some highlights…

iPhone is huge, but not everything

iPhone browsers — including Safari, embedded web views in Facebook and Twitter clients, and iPod Touches — accounted for 64% of our mobile visitors.

The next biggest slice surprised me — Opera Mini, which runs on many phones, including some of the not-so-smart kinds, has 17%.

Android has exploded to 5%. Considering that if I look back six months it was virtually non-existent, that's amazing. I think Android's got serious legs, especially with the publicity Verizon is putting behind their Motorola-designed DROID phone!

The T-Mobile Sidekick (aka the Danger Hiptop) comes in at a very respectble 12%. I'm told by the guys at OpenAirBoston that the Sidekick is the single most popular phone among Boston public school students. Maybe iMarc has a previously unknown youth market. Or possibly a creative director who likes to write crazy Photoshop tutorials.

But Blackberry and PalmOS barely clock in. And I have yet to see a hit from Palm's new WebOS.

Mobile Platform Share

Visitor Activity

iPhone/Safari users spend the most time in both pages-per-visit (chart below) and average time on site, and also have the lowest bounce rate by a large margin. I would account this as being due to the iPhone's superior browser experience, except that the PalmOS Blazer comes in right behind it, at an average of 1.5 pages/visit, and Blazer is not exactly a modern, graphical feature-rich browser. With a whopping four visits from PalmOS devices, though, it's not exactly a statistical universe.

Android and Opera Mini both come in around 1.3 pages/visit, but the few Sidekick and Blackberry visitors never went past the first page they hit. Not big surfers, those users?

Average Viewed Pages per Visit

Flash

Finally, I'll glance at the much-maligned Flash. Everyone knows the iPhone and iPad don't provide the full internet because they don't do Flash, yet every other phone has it. Right? (At least that's what TechCrunch keeps saying…)

The data turn out not to support this claim:

Yup. Nearly 99% of mobile browsers don't do Flash.

Say, what are they looking at?

Oh, content you say? Right, well, most of them are hitting the home page, and Photoshop tutorials account for the next top 10. Then we get notes on bad CSS ideas, iMarc's process, Dave's how to run your own Unix web server series, about iMarc, and my The Scientific Method post.

But mostly, they're here for…

Well… with apologies to Gary Larson…

sigh.

For the record, we also make web sites.