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There is a great arti­cle on the New York Times that reveals the fact that Google has noticed that traf­fic to their sites com­ing from iPhone has surged dur­ing the last hol­i­days period.

You can read the orig­i­nal arti­cle by click­ing here.

I think there a lot of inter­est­ing things in this article.

First one: The amount of traf­fic gen­er­ated by iPhones has been big­ger that the one com­ing from other smart­phones. Impor­tant to notice that accord­ing to mar­ket data released by IDC, a mar­ket research firm, iPhones only accounts for 2% of the total smart­phones in the mar­ket. Inter­est­ing to notice from the very same research data that Sym­bian accounts for 63% and Win­dows Mobile for 11%.

Accord­ing to Charles Wolf, an ana­lyst with Need­ham & Com­pany and Vic Gun­do­tra, a Google vice pres­i­dent who over­sees mobile prod­ucts, this is due to the out­stand­ing qual­ity of the iPhone web browser.

This is real data and so we need to trust what the mar­ket is say­ing. The only objec­tion I would make on this state­ment is that only the Christ­mas period has been ana­lyzed (well, this is what I under­stand read­ing the arti­cle). It seems that the iPhone has been one the great­est gift dur­ing Christ­mas and there may be the case that a lot of peo­ple was just play­ing with their brand new toy such gen­er­at­ing traf­fic to well known web sites.

Even with this caveat the news is really some­thing to be taken in account from mobile phone manufacturers.

Cus­tomers want a great browser with their mobile phone. Full stop.

Mr Gun­do­tra said: “The rea­son no one con­sid­ered this seri­ously is that the Web layer on mobile devices was terrible,”

This is absolutely true.

On the other side we have notice that Google has taken advan­tage of all the capa­bil­i­ties offered by the iPhone web browser by cre­at­ing a com­pelling user expe­ri­ence for their users. So, it is not only a great web browser but a com­bi­na­tion of a great web browser and a great fine tuned back­end on the server side.

If you have ever worked on mobile appli­ca­tion you know very well that device frag­men­ta­tion is one of the most com­plex issues you have to deal with. Google has done a great job releas­ing a cus­tomized ver­sion of their most impor­tant web sites/​services (Search, Gmail, Google Reader and Picasa) for iPhone, but can they do the same for every device that will hit the mar­ket? Prob­a­bly not.

It seems that Google only needed six weeks of work to deliver this appli­ca­tion to iPhone users, but would they do the same for every device out there with a good enough web browser? Again, prob­a­bly not.

The iPhone has shaken up the mobile phone mar­ket but it is still only one mobile phone in a mar­ket where thou­sands of dif­fer­ent mod­els exist. It is quite clear that there is a com­mon prob­lem that need to be solved in the mobile indus­try. How to effec­tively deliver a great user expe­ri­ence to most of your poten­tial cus­tomer base.

How should we approach this problem?

This is a dif­fi­cult ques­tion to answer.

I think that the best approach would be to cre­ate real (web/​application) stan­dards that the mobile phones man­u­fac­tur­ers have to stick with.

Even the Yahoo!Go approach may prove to deliver this kind of expe­ri­ence but they will need to put in a con­sid­er­able effort to sup­port a huge num­ber of mobile phones and devices. Will they do that?

Any­way, as always, the mar­ket will answer the question.

Related posts:

1. Apple iPhone And The Yet To Be Announced Google Phone
2. iPhone Sight­ings
3. iPhone spec­u­la­tions
4. The iPhone Is On Sale
5. links for 2007-​07-​31