I’ve been noticing in the browsing statistics of various websites with which I am involved that mobile devices (think smartphones) are quite recently becoming very much more noticable.

On one ecommerce site, in a week, I saw nearly ten percent of purchases made using Apple Iphones where last year I would have seen none. The site in question retailed products which were in no way I.T. or telecoms related so this came as quite a surprise. Further, this site was not specifically designed to work with mobile browsers although it did have some design features implemented to make browsing on small-screen devices easier. I’ve also spotted numerous visits from Blackberry and Android OS devices across a broad range of sites.

So, are mobile browsers going to take over the internets?

Probably not but they’re certainly going to be a significant presence. In the West, mobile browsing devices now account for as much as 7% of traffic and the rate is growing quickly. I expect that in the near future there will be a significant push by web developers to provide mobile-native versions of their websites due to this expansion.