Nielsen delved a bit further into the activities that American mobile users partake in and found that while the E-Mail and Social Networking sectors maintained their prominence, News & Current Events and Portals saw significant shifts.
E-Mail accounted for 41.60 percent of mobile Internet time based on an average time spent at that category level in May. On an individual site level, this number dropped to 38.50 percent. Nevertheless, on the site level, the E-Mail mobile sector remained the most popular activity for U.S. mobile users.
Social Networking, which claimed 10.50 percent of the category-level share, claimed 10.70 percent at the site level, as it remained the second most popular mobile sector.
News & Current Events, accounted for 4.40 percent of time spent on a category level. This number surged to 7.20 percent on an individual site level, according to Nielsen.
Search received 7.10 percent of mobile Internet time at the category level, and 6.30 percent at the site level.
Meanwhile, Portals received 11.60 percent of time based on a category level, but only 4.60 percent at the individual site level.
But “this doesn’t mean that people are spending any less time on Portal sites,” according to Nielsen. The company goes on to explain:
Nielsen classifies both channels and brands into categories and so a category-level analysis includes both brands (e.g. Google) as well as channels under than brand (e.g. Google News). Using the initial methodology means that all Google time would be assigned to Portals (because Google is a portal) but using the site-level method means the Google News element would be assigned to the News & Current Events sector. Thus, the Portal element is limited to more general and entry pages rather than including content-specific sectors such as news.
Entertainment (4.30 percent at the individual site level), Sports (4.10 percent), Music (4.00 percent), Videos/Music (3.00 percent) and Weather (2.80 percent) rounded out the top 10 mobile sectors based on total time at an individual site level.
iOS remains the most popular mobile operating system, according to Quantcast, as it claimed 56 percent of the North American market in August. It was trailed by Android with 25 percent, RIM OS with 9 percent and all others with 10 percent.
Android is the only mobile OS to have displayed month-over-month growth (2.0 percent), quarter-over-quarter growth (5.5 percent) and year-over-year growth (18.6 percent).
Piper Jaffray forecasts that Android will eventually own half of the smart phone market, while iOS will settle into the 20-30 percent area.
Sources:
http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/how-americans-spend-mobile-internet-time-a-new-look/
http://blog.quantcast.com/quantcast/2010/09/august-2010-mobile-os-share.html
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/android-to-control-half-of-smartphone-market-say-analysts/38881
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