Skip to main content

Mobile Phone Web Browsers Going Mainstream

In 2015, 3.8 billion mobile handsets -- more than 60 percent of the total installed base worldwide -- will contain mobile web browsers, according to the latest market study by ABI Research. That doubles today's penetration rate.

"Mobile browsers are evolving along two paths," says senior analyst Mark Beccue at ABI Research.

On one hand, highly sophisticated browsers, which we are calling full Internet browsers, will be found in all smartphones and a growing number of enhanced (or feature) phones.

Such devices can host these browsers because they have advanced application processors, expanded memory capacity and adequate screen size and resolution. These full Internet browsers typically require about 64 Mb of memory to run.

A real key to the growth of full Internet browsers in higher-end feature phones is the falling cost of sophisticated applications processors. But there is also a second path.

Parallel to this development, a new family of browsers has emerged: the proxy-based (or client-server or compression) browser, which is epitomized by the Opera Mini.

These browsers move some caching and processing off the phone to a nearby server, allowing the browser to run on lower-cost processors and requiring as little as 4 Mb of memory. That means these browsers can be used on even the lowest-cost phones.

The ABI market study indicates that the installed base of full Internet browsers will exceed that of proxy-based browsers sometime in 2012.

Popular posts from this blog

Decoding the Generative AI Global Surge

Commercial interest in Generative AI (GenAI) tools has reached a fever pitch, and the latest forecast from Gartner amplifies this emerging trend. Gartner predicts $644 billion in worldwide spending on GenAI in 2025, marking a dramatic 76.4 percent increase from the previous year. This surge underscores the impact GenAI will have across industries. It also requires a closer examination of the underlying dynamics of future potential. Generative AI Market Development This growth is fueled by the GenAI foundational model providers who invest billions into enhancing the size, performance, and reliability of their models.  Hardware also accounts for a significant portion of this spending, with ~80 percent allocated to servers, smartphones, and PCs equipped with artificial intelligence capabilities. This highlights the critical need for computational power to support the demanding workloads of GenAI. However, Gartner also injects a dose of reality into the GenAI hype cycle. There's a dec...