Has real mobile browsing arrived at last?

The business implications are huge. An entire market of on-deck mobile portals and WAP advertising -- not to mention an emerging market of mobile-specific widgets – have emerged largely because the experience of browsing the full Web on the phone has been so poor.

If mobile users can get the * real * Web on their phone – well-formatted HTML pages, add-on technologies like Flash and Flash video and the full range of desktop browser extensions – than suddenly the Web and mobile content and ad markets might be one in the same. That will have a big impact on the strategies and business models of mobile operators, Web search engines and content providers of all types and forms.

“Once users start to experience a richer, more PC-like experience, you’ll see a lot of the mobile walled gardens start to fall,” said Chris Hazelton, senior analyst – mobile device technology and trends at IDC Research. “It will no longer be two Webs – the desktop Web and the mobile Web – but just a single experience.”

Enabling this change a new browsers that display – even on small phone screens – a Web that looks and acts much like the real thing. The iPhone browser – based on the increasingly popular Webkit browser code -- is the best example of such a browser so far, and TV ads have exposed the panning, zooming iPhone browser to the masses – even if they can’t afford the hefty iPhone price tag quiet yet. The iPhone browser is based on the same code as the desktop Safari browser, an important step toward making the Web experience equal as well.

And the iPhone browser appears to be driving significant usage, even in its early days. According to Google and Yahoo, the iPhone browser this Christmas season accounted for more than 50 percent of mobile traffic to those sites – and that with the iPhone having only a 2 percent share of the mobile phone market at that point. In the same timeframe, reports had the iPhone browser market share reaching .09 percent – which seems small until you realize that, if true, it means one out of 1000 Web pages are being reached using the iPhone.

Not to be outdone capability-wise, Opera has released the Opera Mini, which has similar zoom and pan capabilities as those on the iPhone Safari browser. However, because Opera Mini is Java-based, it can run on any Java-enabled phone. Most phone users aren’t comfortable downloading and installing Java apps yet, but Opera Mini makes advanced browsing capabilities available to phones of all types.

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