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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.

3 of 156 comments (clear)

  1. 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.
  2. 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!!

  3. 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.