Are Cell Phones Ready For The Mobile Internet Boom? (Part 2)

This is the second post on the potential of the Mobile Internet, and how the current line up of cell phones and their networks are hindering full development of this new platform.

If the data behind the promise of the Mobile Internet is so strong, what is holding back more significant usage? As I mentioned in my previous post, it’s the phones, the service, and the synergy, or lack thereof, of the two.

David Benjamin of the EE Times wrote about an interesting panel discussion at the recent Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Spain around the topic “It’s The User Experience, Stupid!” (hat tip to Digital Design Blog) that illustrated some of the core reasons why the Mobile Internet has been so slow in coming and why the mobile industry was caught flat footed by the introduction of the iPhone.

There were two observations that I felt were particularly apt:

• According to Mike Yonker at Texas Instruments, “Searching on a computer is like going to a store, where the customers sees every product displayed, and can make comparisons, touch the products, even try things on for size. Doing the same search on a mobile is like trying to shop in the same store but through a drive-up window.”

• Another panelist, Lucia Predolin, said that one problem is that people are nervous about using the full range of mobile applications — especially the Mobile Internet — because they worry about what kind of bill they’d rack up. With so many telecom companies advertising heavily the cost of their services per minute, users hesitate to explore possibilities that might devour their precious minutes

From a mobile service perspective, I found some additional insights from this article in Cellular News about analyses of actual cell phone usage by Olista, a consultant engaged in monitoring cell phone activity for the mobile industry:

• 70% of users who sign up to content bundles failed to consume any mobile content, indicating that price was not a factor for these users and the barriers to usage were more likely to be associated with ease-of-use or technical problems.
• 85% of mobile TV users abandoned the service after the first viewing and after passing through the advice of notice charge without hesitation, indicating that the user was experiencing navigational difficulties in moving from one TV channel to the next.
• Another worrying statistic for operators and content providers showed that around 50% of all application downloads failed to complete successfully.
• And finally, 30% of mobile users downloaded the same content over and over again such as the same music track, clearly indicating a misunderstanding of how their network works.

So what’s the solution?

Not surprisingly, several of the panelists at the Mobile World Congress cited the iPhone as being the best positioned to bring the Mobile Internet to life. In fact, according to a ChangeWave customer satisfaction study, the iPhone far outclassed the next highest mobile device with 77% of customers being very satisfied with their iPhones, significantly ahead of the runner up Blackberry at 50%.

However, the same could not be said for the iPhone’s service provider, AT&T, which only managed a 31% very satisfied level from a service perspective, which was a distant second to Verizon.

So as long as the iPhone is shackled to AT&T’s painfully slow Edge network, the Mobile Internet will have to wait for the device/service plan bundle that will do what Google did for the Web.

In my final post of this series, I’ll look at a couple of consumer insight based ideas or issues that may need to be levered or addressed before the mobile boom can truly become a reality.