Yankee Group: Best of the Anywhere Web 2009

Executive Summary

What a difference a year makes.

When we first started writing about the Anywhere Web in 2008, many considered it a curiosity, available only to people with expensive data plans and pricey iPhones. And frankly, some of that view was because of the content available. The vast majority of Web sites worked fine on desktop Web browsers, but when consumers took that content mobile, it just didn’t work. Big photos overwhelmed tiny mobile phone screens, big pages overloaded mobile networks, and Web sites pushed more data at mobile users than they could handle. When we assessed 32 mobile Web sites in November 2008 using our Yankee Group Mobile Web Report Card, not a single site passed our stringent criteria required to deem them Anywhere Web sites.

Today, the mobile Web has gone mainstream. With more than 2 million mobile Web domains in use today, 31 percent of mobile phone-owning consumers now browse the mobile Web at least once a month, with news, search and weather being their most popular destinations (see Exhibit 1 on the next page). In August and September 2009, we evaluated 27 news, search, sports and carrier mobile sites for how well they adapt to mobile users, devices and networks.

Keywords

Best, Anywhere, web, mobile, browser

Pages
Publish Date & Author(s)

by Carl Howe, Director
15 pages
September 2009