The TechCrunchIT post by Vic Gundotra who is the Vice President of Engineering for Google’s mobile and developer products, presents a lot of interesting data:
- 4 billion global mobile subscribers (ITU, 2009)
- In 2009 half of all connections to the internet worldwide will come from a mobile phone. (eMarketer, 2008 and 2009)
This is a bit hard to believe even for me, as I would imagine that most cellphone customers don’t have a data plan.
MetroPCS is a prepaid cellphone company which offers fully unlimited plans starting at just $40/month. They have 5 million subscribers and just entered the New York market. I was aware of their offerings but not the data promotion for new voice customers: free internet for the first month and if they choose to upgrade, unlimited data for a flat rate. As a result nearly half of their users optin for this down the line. The big point here is simplicity as all consumers demand an unlimited data access just like with our home ISP.
The original article has a lot of interesting mobile stats from Google indicating current trends:
In a few years the mobile phone will become a mobile computer with the ability to make voice calls being just one of the features.
Following that, there will be a move to the web-enabled applications that live in the browser just as we have seen on the PCs. But for now the hype is still around installable native applications.
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