One in five U.S. mobile subscribers surf the mobile Web daily, and one-third of U.S. subscribers access the mobile Web at least once each week. Those are just some of the provocative findings of the Mobile Internet Attitudes Report 2011, commissioned by Antenna and conducted by YouGov. YouGov polled a nationally representative sample of 2296 UK and 2079 U.S. adults aged 18 and up in January 2011.
Another discovery was that mobile Web usage is driven by social networking and instant messaging: Among those on the mobile Web daily, 27 percent of U.S. subscribers engage in social networking and 22 percent are instant messaging.
Room for improvement was also clear: of the U.S. respondents, 44 percent did not use the mobile Web despite having the ability to do so. Furthermore, 27 percent find that websites do not display or function properly on their handset, and 28 percent avoid mobile sites because of difficulties in navigating them. Furthermore, 33 percent of U.S. subscribers (and 39 percent of UK subscribers) say the mobile Web is too expensive, but almost 50 percent of U.S. subscribers pay for mobile Internet access (the figure increases to 92 percent for smart phone owners).