Apple Thoughts: iPhone Users Use More Mobile Data Than Others

"Compared to other smartphone owners, iPhone users not only go on the Internet more often, but tend to browse for longer periods of time and download more mobile content in the process. According to Roger Entner, a telecom research analyst for Nielsen, AT&T's network still isn't prepared for an onslaught in data consumption. In an interview with the USA Today, Entner points out that the average iPhone user consumes upwards of 400 MB of data every month. In comparison, most smartphone users only consume around 40-80 MB of data every month."

Of course iPhone users use more data. The experience is infinitely better than anything else out there! This is no secret to anyone who's used another smart phone. Would you want to do more than extremely light browsing on a BlackBerry? Or how about using the Pocket IE from Windows Mobile 6? Both are unmitigated disasters for browsing anything but custom-designed web sites.

Is Safari on the iPhone perfect? Nope. I'd still like to see Flash in it just so that the only barricade to the "real web" can be removed, but Safari's speed, rendering accuracy, and overall ease of use put it at the top of the heap. Even derivatives of Webkit on other handhelds (think Palm Pre and Android) are exceptionally good and are likely to put similar strains on Sprint and T-Mobile's network as their marketshare continues to increase.

There's a reason the iPhone is a data consumption machine: it works.