Daily mobile internet use doubles in U.S.

More than 22.3 million Americans access their internet on their mobile devices every day — twice as many as a year ago, says a new report.

In total, 63.2 million people read news and information on the internet using mobile devices each month in the three-month period ending January 2009, up from 36.8 million a year earlier, said a report released Monday by comScore Inc., a market research company focused on technology.

About a third of those users went to the mobile internet daily, about a third reached it weekly, and about a third accessed it at least once during the month.

"Much of the growth in news and information usage is driven by the increased popularity of downloaded applications, such as those offered for the iPhone, and by text-based searches," Mark Donovan, senior vice president of comScore's mobile division, said in a statement.

Maps were the most popular downloaded phone application, with 8.2 million users, while 14.1 million users used SMS-based searches.

Donovan added that 70 per cent of people who reach the internet from a mobile device do so using a regular mobile phone, rather than a smartphone.

Mobile social networking soars

Reading news and information was still by far the most popular use for mobile internet, but other uses saw proportionately bigger gains.

The number of people using mobile internet to access social networking sites or blogs more than quintupled to 9.3 million, while the number of people trading stocks or getting financial information almost tripled to 3.3 million.

The study found that mobile internet access was most popular among men aged 18 to 34, of which about half used it. About 40 per cent of women aged 18 to 24 also used the internet on their mobile devices.

However, women aged 24 to 34 were much less likely to do so.