A recent report from metrics leader comScore shows significant growth in usage of the mobile web, more than doubling from 10.8 million to 22.4 million daily users between January 2008 and 2009. Although accessing news and information is by far the most typical activity for mobile web users, accessing a social networking site is the fastest-growing usage trend with a whopping 427% growth over the past year (caveat: the metric is actually listed as "Accessed social networking site or blog" so some of the impact of that statistic may be diminished by the lack of distinction). Interestingly, although the increasing popularity of smartphones and downloadable applications (looking at you, iPhone) are credited with much of the growth in mobile web usage, comScore says that a full 70% of users accessing the mobile web are using basic, no frills feature phones.

Our friends at mobile site jkOnTheRun posit three major factors behind the growth trend, including increased adoption of 3G data plans, the combination of mobile application stores with more mobile-friendly web sites, and a greater maturity in particularly Webkit-based mobile web browsers. We'd love to see U.S. carriers get on board more strongly behind point one and offer a greater variety of more flexible and more reasonably-priced data plans. Moreover, as Ars Technica's Erica Sadun notes, we need a better solution for data access on multiple devices. There's no reason I should be paying a monthly rate equivalent to twice what I pay for broadband internet in the home office just to connect a smartphone and a 3G laptop card away from home. For travellers with sporadic schedules, months' worth of data expenditures can go unused as well; if there were better pay-as-you-go and other out of contract data services more available, more occasional travellers would make use of them whereas expensive and lengthy contracts currently prohibit adoption.

Head on to the continued part of this post for the graph of mobile web activity in 2008 broken down by activity.

This story around the web: