Google has reported an acceleration of Internet activity among cell phone users since introducing faster Web services on some phones, fueling confidence that the mobile Internet era is at hand.
Early evidence showing sharp increases in Internet use on phones, not just computers, has emerged from services that Google began offering in recent months on the Blackberry, the iPhone and Nokia devices for business professionals and creators of multimedia pictures and videos, Google said Tuesday.
"We have very much hit a watershed moment in terms of mobile Internet usage," Matt Waddell, a product manager for Google Mobile, said in an interview. "We are seeing that mobile Internet use is in fact accelerating.
The growing availability of flat-rate data plans from phone carriers instead of per-minute charges that previously discouraged Internet use, along with improved Web browsers on cell phones and better-designed services from companies like Google, are fueling the growth, Waddell said.
Google announced the findings as it introduced a software download for cell phones running Microsoft Windows Mobile software that conveniently positions a Google Web search window on the home screen of such phones.
Similar versions of the search software, which Google introduced for Blackberry users in December and certain Nokia phones in February, have sped up the time users take to perform Web searches by 40 percent and, in turn, driven usage.
The software shortcuts the time it takes for people to perform Web searches on Google by eliminating initial search steps of finding a Web browser on the phone, opening the browser, waiting for network access, and getting to Google.com. By making a Google search box more convenient, cell phone users have begun using the Internet more, the company said.
"We are actually seeing a 20 percent increase in the number of searches by people," Waddell said. Google's mobile plug-in software lets users customize their phones to feature Google mobile services instead of relying solely on software features network carriers have preinstalled on the devices.
"Faster is better than slow, especially on a mobile device, where fast is much better than slow," Waddell said. "Not only are we are seeing increased user satisfaction but also greater usage."
Google officials said in August that they had seen a similar surge in the use of Google.com via mobile devices after the iPhone was introduced last year.
Waddell said Google had seen iPhone users perform as many as 50 times more Web searches on these computer-phone devices as users of standard mobile feature phones typically do. The iPhone offers a full-featured Internet browser, unlike many phones.
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