No rush to mobile data in U.S.

Just as we're seeing useful new formats for scanning links quickly in mobile devices, out comes evidence that American mobile phone usage still, mostly, isn't about Internet-style data at all.

According to eMarketer, only about 16 percent of the 213 million mobile phone subscribers in the United States accessed the Internet from their mobile device in a recent month.

Considering the widespread use of mobile data and Internet services in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, 16% seems remarkably low and once again confirms the U.S. as being very much a PC-centric Internet market.

Reasons? eMarketer cites a few, while saying these do not explain the phenomenon completely:

• Generational differences. No one with teen-agers in the house should be surprised to learn that younger people use mobile data services more than older generations.
• "Bucket plans" of minutes make it as cheap to make a voice call as send a text message or e-mail. (And, I'll add, every phone I've tried makes it far easier to make a call than to do anything else.)
• Up to now, says eMarketer, you could blame the slow rollout of advanced mobile data networks -- small pipes, slow services, less consumer interest. But that's changing, and even slow services didn't hold up our Asian and European friends from their seeming addictions to mobile data services.
• Content providers may hesitate because the money flow is slow. "One of the significant ways in which DoCoMo has developed such a flourishing mobile content sector is simply by paying the content provider in a timely fashion. According to eMarketer's mobile analyst, John Gauntt, 'U.S. operators are still scrambling to get their billing systems up to snuff for doing more than voice traffic.'"

None of that means it's safe for U.S. content providers to ignore the mobile data networks. Mobile data services penetration sits today about where overall Internet penetration sat, say, 10 years ago. And judging by all the Web site 10th anniversaries being observed by content providers -- mitigated by our ongoing struggles to capitalize on what now, obviously, is rapidly becoming the content exchange platform of choice -- it's not too early to start strategic planning for rich mobile content deployments.

Gotta run. My cell's ringing.

Update (12:26 p.m. EDT, 8/24/06): Steve Yelvington checks in on this topic: "As the telcos slowly get over their failed attempts to own/control it all and clean up their pricing mess -- and I think they will -- I believe we're going to see a rapid upswing in mobile Internet usage. To be part of this growing mobile Internet, we need to not only build pages that are optimized for little screens, but more importantly build services that are optimized for mobile users." His post includes examples.