From Wired

It’s amazing what a halfway-decent browsing experience can do for mobile internet usage. A new study from measurement firm M:Metrics confirms what was pretty much common knowledge: Give users a good phone browser, and they’ll flock to the mobile web.

After charting the habits of more than 10,000 adults for six months after the iPhone’s U.S. launch, M:Metrics concludes that nearly 85 percent of iPhone purchasers regularly use their handheld device to access news and other content on the web.

Compare that to the 58 percent of total smartphone owners who browse web content and just 13 percent of overall mobile phone users who do, and you get an idea of how much a simple interface can do to inspire usage. You can just picture the design meetings happening at phone manufacturers around the world: “Wait, if we make a web browser that doesn’t make users feel like jabbing forks into their eyes, they’ll actually want to browse the web?”

The study also found that 59 percent of iPhone users visited a search engine on their phone, compared to 37 percent of smartphone users and a miniscule 6 percent of mobile phone users. This corroborates information Google released last month, which said the search company saw on average 50 times more search requests coming from Apple iPhones than any other mobile handset.

Read more at Wired

Over at Creative Techs they have a great write up of the iPhone simulator that is part of the iPhone SDK.  The iPhone simulator allows you to view (without an iPhone) what your websites will look like on the iPhone.  This is a very handy tool considering a lot of people browse the internet with their iPhones and you may want to start thinking about developing your website for this platform.

If you are a web designer, your clients may soon start worrying how their websites work on an iPhone. That’s because after only eight months, iPhones now account for a remarkable 71% of all US Mobile Browser web traffic.

Designing websites that take advantage of the iPhone web environment requires more than simply designing for a smaller screen size. The iPhone automatically scales websites when needed. iPhone readers use multi-touch gestures to zoom or move around the page. Flash isn’t supported, and neither are larger animated GIFs (a surprise to me).

Tucked away in Apple’s free iPhone Software Development Kit is a terrific iPhone Simulator you can use to test and preview your websites. In the full version of this tip we’ll show you where that iPhone Simulator application is hidden, and include a few tips on how to test various iPhone features.

Read more at Creative Techs