iPhone users were 50 times as likely to search the internet using Google than people with any other handset, a key Google executive told the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last week.
The Financial Times reports that Google has conducted as study of the mobile search habits of people with a number of different handsets and found iPhone users are by far the most likely to browse the net than others.
The result was so marked that at first Google couldn’t believe it. “We thought it was a mistake and made our engineers check the logs again,” Google head of mobile operations Vic Gundotra says.
In fact, he says, if other handset manufacturers follow Apple’s lead in making web access easy, the number of mobile searches will overtake fixed internet searches “within the next several years”.
Gutondra’s comments mirror data released by US iPhone carrier AT&T, which found that average revenue per iPhone user was nearly twice that of a person with a normal handset because of the heavier data download rate for the iPhone.