With the coming of the iPhone the mobile web became something for the normal person. Mobile web has been around for quite some years, but it wasn't really popular (and if you've ever tried it with some old fashioned Nokia handy, you know why). Most of the newer mobile phones that come out today provide a pretty decent web experience. Even though people still have the opinion that only iPhone user surf the web. Wrong!

I used to be a developer and we actually built a pretty nice looking mobile website for a customer… it was more of an iPhone website. It was all optimized to run on the iPhone and tested exclusively on the iPhone. The reason? Our client only had an iPhone and was zeroed in it plus the budget was too tight that we didn't even bother having a look at the site with another mobile device. I think due to the redirect rule you couldn't actually access it with an Android device (but nobody cared/cares?). We thought: Who cares, it's mostly iPhone users that will surf the web anyway. Wrong!

There are other players on the market and they are catching up fast!

It's pretty evenly distributed with 23% going to Safari devices like iPhone and Ipod (iPad is not included here), 20% to Opera, 18% for Blackberry, 16% to Nokia and only 13% to Android. Android is though going to catch up fast, as cheaper and more devices will come to the market. So if you optimize your site only for the iPhone you are not going to make the majority of your users happy.

In those last 10% is also the Windows 7 phone included. I would guess they are going to have a hard time catching up with all the others: Business people stick with Blackberry, the cool trendy people haven an iPhone and the techies have an Android phone. Let's hope it's not going to catch up more, because the browser is based on IE7 and I don't think IE7 supports very many features of HTML 5 and CSS 3 (if any?). Maybe the people with a Windows phone should just stick to Opera.

Data comes from quirksmode.org.