John Whelan is Off Portal and Off Net!

Carphone Warehouse ignores mobile internet

The Carphone Warehouse in conjunction with the LSE has published a free survey of 16,000 people in the UK on mobile usage. I think while there are some useful data therein, I think it is important to keep in mind that the purpose of this survey is more to generate tabloid headlines like "Half of young adult phone users have sent or received a sexually explicit text" and associated PR, rather than scientific research.

In some ways surveys like this are more interesting in what they leave out and how they phrase the questions rather than the results themselves. For example there is not a single mention of the words "browsing" or "WAP" in the report. The fact that the "internet" as used in the survey , refers to desktop browsing should give our industry cause for concern. The Carphone Warehouse who sell thousands of handsets a day doesn't even consider mobile internet as a topic in a survey subtitled "How mobile phones change the way we live".

posted by alatto @ 10:36 AM