ReadWriteWeb

What important Web browsing feature is sorely missing from mobile Safari, the iPhone's built-in browser? If you're like us, you probably said the ability to search for text within a Web page. We're accustomed to using this feature in the grown-up Web browsers on our desktop and laptop machines, but sadly, it's lacking when we switch over to the mini-browser built into our mobile phone.

Until now, that is. In yet another case of "there's an app for that," there is, in fact, a new iPhone application that adds the "find within a page" feature to the iPhone browser. And it's well worth the $0.99 fee to finally have this function at our disposal again.

Siri is one of the most ambitious mobile services we have seen in the last few years. Imagine if you could just talk to you phone and tell it to call you a taxi, reserve a table at your favorite restaurant or tell you what the weather in New York City will be like tomorrow. If you have an iPhone, you will be able to start doing that tonight. Siri, a virtual personal assistant, will recognize your voice query and either give you the answer to your question or connect you to the right web service.

During Google's Q4 earnings call, a lot of the discussion focused on the mobile web. Google clearly thinks that the mobile web is poised for massive growth over the next few years and projects like Android show that Google wants to control as much of this market as possible. One of the most interesting comments during yesterday's call came from Jonathan Rosenberg, Google's vice president for product development, who said that "with all the capabilities these phones that are coming out have like GPS, cameras, we think there is the potential to actually make this mobile web better than the PC web."

Over the last week we ran a series of posts outlining the five biggest Internet trends of this year: Structured Data, Real-Time Web, Personalization, Mobile Web / Augmented Reality, Internet of Things. Effectively this was ReadWriteWeb's State of the Web 2009.

We've now compiled the main points into a single presentation, available on Slideshare and embedded below. You can view the presentation in full screen by clicking the "full" button at the bottom of the presentation. You can also download the presentation as a Powerpoint file. All of the links in the presentation are clickable, should you wish to explore a certain topic more.

According to a new report from Cambridge University (PDF), students aren't interested in being able to read eBooks and eJournals on their mobile phones. Instead, users are far more interested in opening hours, location maps, contact info, and access to the library catalog. Most respondents were also far more interested in getting alerts by text message than being able to use library resources over the mobile web.

At the beginning of this year, analyst firm Gartner released a report that highlights eight up-and-coming mobile technologies which they predict will impact the mobile industry over the course of the next two years. According to Nick Jones, vice president and analyst at the firm, the technologies they've identified will evolve quickly and will likely pose issues that will have to be addressed by short term strategies.

Social networking site MySpace has just launched a new version of their mobile website designed for iPhone, Android and Palm WebOS users. The now-improved site at m.myspace.com offers quick access to your profile, including comments, your activity stream, your status, your inbox and more. Also available is a button dedicated to your photos, which makes it easier to browse through your albums. However, the most notable of the new features is the built-in instant-messaging function which makes the new mobile website a communication tool in addition to being just another social-networking app.

According to recent predictions from analyst firm IDC, mobile web usage is set to explode over the course of next year due to market forces like the tripling of iPhone applications, the quintupling of Android applications and the introduction of Apple's long-rumored tablet computer. This forecast was among the firm's many year-end predictions released in a report that offered a broad overview of what's to come in 2010 in the IT industry, cloud computing, the mobile web and the overall technology marketplace.

In what's become an annual tradition, over December ReadWriteWeb will present our 'best of' posts for 2009. These are a series of articles that will examine the top web products in categories ranging from consumer web apps to RSS and syndication platforms. Today, we're kicking off the series with a look at the top mobile web products of the past year. This is a subjective list of editorially selected products, but one which includes some of the biggest names in mobile web applications for 2009.

Mobile ad firm AdMob has revealed the dramatic changes the mobile industry has seen in their latest Mobile Metrics Report, released just this morning. Believe it or not, it was only a year ago that the Motorola RAZR scored as the number one phone here in the U.S. while the iPhone was the only touchscreen device to even make the list of top ten handsets. Only a year later, and so much has changed. Now half of the top ten are touchscreen devices, six include Wi-Fi capabilities, and six have mobile application stores. And as you would expect, this new crop of super-powered phones are making heavy use of the mobile web.

An independent study by Equation Research found that today's consumers are disappointed with the performance of the mobile web. Despite the proliferation of smartphones with their full-featured web browsers, the majority of mobile web surfers have encountered issues with accessing websites via their handsets over the past year. The number one issue reported involves websites that are too slow to load, frustrating users to the point that over half said they would never return to the site in question.

"I didn't really use Facebook that much until I got my iPhone." Sound familiar? That sentiment and variations of it has provided powerful anecdotal evidence over the past several months about the impact smartphones are having on the way people are using the mobile web to connect with others. Through the mobile phone, today's more mainstream users - those folks who don't count sitting behind a glowing screen among their favorite pastimes - have begun to interact on the mobile web, specifically the social web, in greater numbers than ever before.

A new report by Openwave provides more evidence of this trend. Their findings show that four of the top ten domains accessed via mobile devices are social networking sites. Facebook and MySpace, of course, featured prominently on that list.

Last week we ran a series of posts outlining the 5 biggest Internet trends of this year: Structured Data, Real-Time Web, Personalization, Mobile Web / Augmented Reality, Internet of Things. Effectively this was ReadWriteWeb's State of the Web 2009.

We've now compiled the main points into a single presentation, available on Slideshare and embedded below. You can view the presentation in full screen by clicking the "full" button at the bottom of the presentation. You can also download the presentation as a Powerpoint file. All of the links in the presentation are clickable, should you wish to explore a certain topic more.

There's no question that mobile web use is on the rise. Recent reports tell us that cellular networks worldwide are seeing major increases in growth. In fact, there are even concerns that the current infrastructure won't be able to keep up with the new demands. According to one research firm, 3G traffic in developed markets will increase by 20% by the end of 2014 but some operators will face HSPA capacity shortfalls as soon as mid-2010, if not earlier. Forrester Research also recently predicted that more than a third of Europeans will be accessing the mobile internet by 2014.

With these levels of growth, we're also seeing related mobile services getting a boost. App stores, both phone-based and carrier-based, are popping up left and right, mobile video usage is booming, and mobile ad markets are seeing dramatic growth, too. However, there's one area that hasn't yet benefitted from the mobile revolution: mobile e-commerce.

Recently, researchers at the Nielsen Norman Group put the mobile web to the test in a usability study that looked at twenty different web sites on six different types of handsets. The results? The mobile web still leaves a lot to be desired. It's so bad, in fact, that principal researcher Jakob Nielsen, co-author of the study, compared today's mobile web to the web sites of the early 90's.

But is the mobile web really to blame here for the usability issues? Or is this just a matter of people trying to surf a web that has evolved beyond what traditional cell phones and their awful built-in browsers can handle?

According to a new report from Cambridge University (PDF), students aren't interested in being able to read eBooks and eJournals on their mobile phones. Instead, users are far more interested in opening hours, location maps, contact info, and access to the library catalog. Most respondents were also far more interested in getting alerts by text message than being able to use library resources over the mobile web.

According to a report released today from mobile advertising company AdMob, smartphones accounted for nearly three times more use than their relative market share last month. The report also found that relative use of both mobile-specific websites and HTML sites was highest on Apple and Android devices.

Results were based on user-generated requests for mobile ads during April 2009 as well as on a Gartner report on smartphone sales in Q4 2008.

In the evolving Web, where mobile web growth is exploding and therefore the mobile experience matters as much as the desktop one, it is becoming increasingly important for websites to ensure that their mobile site performs well. According to a new mobile web performance benchmark produced by Gomez (a web application performance management firm) and dotMobi (the company behind the .mobi Internet domain), there is a widening performance gap between the traditional fixed web and the mobile web. According to Gomez data, traditional fixed websites loaded an average of 3% faster in April than in March, while mobile websites were 9% slower. We check out Gomez's data below.

If you need any more proof of how fast the mobile web is growing, just look at the latest numbers coming out of Opera today. The company is reporting a 157% increase in usage of their Opera Mini web browser from March 2008 to March 2009. And the mobile web isn't just booming here in the Western world - it's also experiencing rapid growth in places like Latin America and Nigeria, too.

On Thursday at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Yahoo's Marc Davis spoke about the mobile internet and the future of the mobile industry. As the mobile web evolves, he said, it's no longer good enough to simply port the PC experience to the phone's small screen - it's time to start building "mobile-first" products instead. What are "mobile-first" products? They're services designed to take advantage of the strengths and abilities of the mobile devices themselves, leading to entirely unique creations that can only be found on the mobile web.