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The Mobile Internet Is the Internet (qz.com)

Posted by msmash on from the where-we-are dept.

A reader shares a Quartz report: Think back to the mobile phone you had in 2010. It could access the internet, but it wasn't such a great experience. On average, people only spent 20% of their time online on their phones back then, according to Zenith, a media agency. Today, by contrast, we spend around 70% of our time on the internet on phones, based on estimates and forecasts for more than 50 countries covering two-thirds of the world's population. By 2019, Zenith says this will rise to close to 80%. What used to be called "mobile internet" is now just the internet.

20 of 156 comments (clear)

  1. Mobile internet still sucks by Vermonter · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It just sucks less. I would still much rather sit in front of my computer if I have the opportunity where I have a much larger screen and a physical keyboard.

    I would be interested to see if people are spending that much less time on their computers for internet browsing, or if they are just on the internet more because it's easier now to pull out your mobile phone when you're bored and check your favorite social media sites.

    1. Re:Mobile internet still sucks by Tablizer · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Young people seem better at using small screens and "thumb" keying such that the difference between a PC/netbook and phone is smaller to them. If you spend all your life peeping through keyholes, then you get good at using keyholes.

      --
      Table-ized A.I.
    2. Re:Mobile internet still sucks by Anne+Thwacks · · Score: 3, Insightful
      Good luck downloading a linux iso on a phone. Good luck downloading a linux iso on a phone.

      It may be quicker using 3 than using my "Professional" BT broadband. However, I have yet to find a way to burn CD images from my phone.

      However, the reason why people spend far longer using the Internet from a phone is obvious: its the UI, stupid! It takes at least 3 times longer to do the same task on a phone as a PC because of the crap UIs.

      Why can't I have Gnome2/Mate/fvwm95 on my phone? Hierarchical Drop down menus are a great idea. Stupid, unrecognisable Icons - not so good.

      --
      Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
    3. Re:Mobile internet still sucks by Megol · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I'd recommend relaxing. One doesn't always have to do things and learning to accept that is healthy.
      Have to say that properly learning to relax/meditate isn't a waste of time - being able to think of the problems in ones life calmly without being stressed leads to better solutions in general.

  2. No. by Frosty+Piss · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The Mobile Internet Is the Internet

    If you are a consumer of crap, someone who lives their life of Facebook, than yes, your mobile phone is the Internet, the way you validate your sad little life.

    Other people do other things "on the Internet" that do not revolve around Social Media.

    --
    If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
    1. Re:No. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Oh good, we've rebranded AI, and now we've rebranded social media as "anything with a forum? "

      I've been consuming / posting on slashdot for almost 20 years, and I don't and won't ever have an account. How is this social media exactly ?

    2. Re:No. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      As someone who has been on the internet since even before 300baud acoustically coupled modems. I generally agree with the GPs sentiment. The Eternal September still has not ended. that being said. Things like FB have their place for the masses. I mostly despise ads. If anyone says that ads pay for the internet and if it stopped the internet would wither, I'd say good. The internet was just fine before X10 pioneered pop unders, the internet was vibrant before facebook, the internet used to be a positive thing before ads

    3. Re:No. by tehcyder · · Score: 2

      Oh good, we've rebranded AI, and now we've rebranded social media as "anything with a forum? "

      I've been consuming / posting on slashdot for almost 20 years, and I don't and won't ever have an account. How is this social media exactly ?

      Slashdot is as much social media as Twitter. People post comments, reply to comments, and so on. Whether I'm replying to user number 99999999 or AC is irrelevant, I don't know you either way.

      I doubt many people using Twitter know the person they're communicating with in real life.

      --
      To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
  3. You are all cows. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    You are all cows. Cows say moo. MOOOO! MOOOOOO! Moo cows MOOOOOO! Moo say the cows. YOU 4G COWS!!

    1. Re:You are all cows. by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 2

      I agree with Captain Cow.

      Call me "old fashion" or "out of touch" but I don't own a smartphone or a laptop. What I do own is a desktop computer and a "feature phone". One stays plugged in all the time and the other needs charging every few weeks. If you cannot wait until you get to a computer terminal to access information then perhaps you should reconsider your priorities in life.

      Listen to your elder... millennial. ;)

      --
      Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
    2. Re:You are all cows. by WaffleMonster · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You are all cows. Cows say moo. MOOOO! MOOOOOO

      MoooOO0OoO00Oo.

      Personally I am really impressed with the technology. The capabilities of systems and networks of all shapes and sizes are still a source of amazement. Mobile especially. Tiny pocket sized computers with LTE, gigs of ram, quad core CPUs and GPUs, full HD displays. It's all rather amazing.

      Yet here I am wasting all of that potential pretending to be a cow.

      For me using a smartphone is like being stuck in a timewarp. So slow and tedious I completely lose track of time. What takes seconds in a laptop or PC takes minutes on a smartphone. It is not devices running slow but rather software and human interfaces that are laughably insufficient.. like frantically trying to suck enough water out of a straw to fill a swimming pool.

      Now thanks to mobile all of the Internet is turning into a straw. Massive fonts, giant buttons, zero useful information and endless jackpot scrolling .. perhaps this is the screen that has information relevant to what I want... no let me try the next...nope not that one... ah ha!.....nope... false alarm...

    3. Re:You are all cows. by apoc.famine · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Well, you are definitely old fashioned and out of touch. :)

      I did reconsider my priorities in life, and that's what lead to the smartphone. I have a 30 minute public transport commute each way to work. My priority was not being at work longer than I had to be, which lead me to consider making functional use of my commute. So now I zip off a half-dozen emails to and from work, and stay in the office an hour less each day.

      I can also pop off early to the pub and have a beer, because I'm 5 seconds from being able to start responding to any emergency. Sure, being retired and not having to do that would be nice, but until then, it's incredible that I can have the bulk of the internet in my pocket running on a machine that's faster than a lot of the computers I built in my life.

      Not having to spend a full workday on a floor filled with gray cubicles under fluorescent lights is definitely a good reason to get a smartphone in my opinion. YMMV, but as a large portion of my job is being an on-demand SME, doing that on a smartphone with a beer in my hand is only marginally harder than sitting at my computer. The only real problem is swype not knowing a lot of the technological jargon and abbreviations I have to use.

      --
      Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
  4. More time, less useful by hawguy · · Score: 4, Informative

    While I may spend more time on the mobile web -- reading news on the train, etc, it's still way less usable than my computer, so anytime I need more interaction with a site (i.e. purchasing an item, doing research on a subject where I want to reference several tabs, etc), I use my computer.

    And I hate the responsive design trend that gives me a watered down experience with functionality either hidden or completely removed from the mobile experience.

    1. Re:More time, less useful by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Zooming causes problems for shitty web developers that hard-code page widths and don't understand the need to allow flexibility in their design process.

      I am a web developer, and I would never release a site to the public that can't be zoomed. That's just asking for people to click the close button (because it's the only one they can hit accurately).

      I'm more than a bit sickened by the current trend toward non-flexibility in web design. It used to be frowned on to hard-code anything. Now it's frowned on to let your browsers experience any form of flexibility. I take it as a sign than the marketing geniuses that thought ad-slicks translated directly to the web eventually won through sheer corporate culture immobility.

  5. consider the Rapture by epine · · Score: 2

    Rapture #1: All the mobile users of the internet are snatched up by God.

    Does anyone other than click-steam entrepreneurs even notice their absence?

    Rapture #2: All the desktop and workstation users of the internet are snatched up by an advanced alien civilization.

    The internet ceases to function in 3, 2, 1 ... 404.

    Help desks everywhere begin to return 410 Gone.

    #ShitShitShit commences trending on Twitter.

  6. Nonsense by Rick+Schumann · · Score: 2, Insightful

    There is one Internet, regardless of what computing device you use to access it.

  7. HTC Dream was promising, everything after is CRAP by nctritech · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I had the pleasure of owning the first Android phone, the HTC Dream (T-Mobile G1) when it was a pretty new thing. The five-row keyboard, trackball, and extra hardware buttons basically meant that I had a tiny "laptop" in my pocket. I used it for VNC. I used it for SSH. I even ran a Debian overlay with X on it just because I could. It made the iPhones look stupid: one button, clunky touch-everything, dumbed down trash.

    Then the next phone I ended up with had a four-row keyboard and an optical "trackball." OK, it was still quite usable and the optical tracking was admittedly a lot nicer, plus it was less hefty and still a nifty slider phone, with better hardware specs than the Dream had.

    Then hardware keyboards on phones were...just gone...and the "mouse" was eliminated entirely, as were physical buttons (in favor of nasty glitchy badly-behaved capacitive touch buttons.) That was where phones went to shit and never recovered. Never mind the app-ocalypse, where the free and open internet was gutted by the use of walled-garden apps, each with their own inconsistent behavior and each requiring its own ever-growing hefty pile of resources on your never-sufficient internal storage.

    Apps for big services that have a website are almost always a step backwards and are ALWAYS bloated piles of trash compared to what they should be: a tiny extension for the website to access native phone features that web standards don't exist for. Of course, now we've got standards for most of those too, so why do we still need apps for most things AT ALL? Because Facebook can't mine your damn contacts if they don't have an app, that's why.

    Bring back five-row hardware keyboards, slider phones, and optical trackballs. Bring back phones that don't suck and stop shoving apps down our throats.

  8. Depends on the use by nwaack · · Score: 2

    This story misses a huge point - what people are doing that 70% of the time on the "mobile internet." Just because hopelessly addicted phone addicts spend 12 hours a day on social media and netflix doesn't mean that this has somehow supplanted the "regular internet." Things that aren't a waste of time are generally done in front of a real screen on a real computer, which is why, even if it's just 30% of the time, the important stuff is still being done on a fully-functional website. Thus, websites designed for computer monitors won't be going away any time in the next 10 years.

  9. It's still a mess by cmaurand · · Score: 3

    Meh, a walled garden does not the internet make.

  10. Imprecision of a finger by tepples · · Score: 2

    Why can't I have Gnome2/Mate/fvwm95 on my phone?

    Imprecision of a finger as a pointing device, and general lack of demand among users for stylus-driven interfaces.

    Hierarchical Drop down menus are a great idea. Stupid, unrecognisable Icons - not so good.

    The menu philosophy of things like MATE and Xfce assumes that users can hit long, skinny targets. This is true of a mouse, where hit ease is related to area (w * h). It is not true of a finger, where hit ease is related to the shorter of the two dimensions (min(w, h)).