iPhone IS the mobile internet

Engadget who has gone out of their way to mention they had no intentions of writing any proprietary access programs for mobile devices today announced an iPhone specific Application/browser as a result of research that showed that more than 95%! of all mobile traffic to their site is iPhones (iTouch count too).   LINK

Interweb smack down

Given the current crop of mobile computing devices and even some of the ones in near term development.  who will make the product people are more or even AS likely to use on the interWebs as the iPhone? The top Win Mobile phone is the HTC Touch Cruise and by my feeble math the TOTAL use share on Engadgets web site of all Win Mobile phones represent only 1%.  Maybe Microsoft is emulating Apple by being the “The super-small market-share guy”

Network Externalities are the path to dominance in a format war (see evil empire vs. Apple mid 80s to …) and Apple is out to a huge early lead in the mobile computing marketplace, Blackberry notwithstanding.  Businesses and individuals will find the choice to use an iPhone easier as time goes on because it will do more than other phones just because it already does it.  There is no Technical reason Engadget could not build software optimized for another device but they won’t.  They won’t because there will be no reason to and the people buying a mobile computing device that want access to Engadget ( or any of the other gazillion iPhone accelerated web sites) will find that iPhone is the only one that gives them what they want.

Apple will dominate the mobile computing space, the questions are by how much and who will be the alternatives.  The only current promising player seems to be Android but not for a while.  WinMobile is DOA so Microsoft could (not really) give up and start over with a real competing product but that would be years away.  Blackberry is a wildcard clearly a great device but the lack of a real computing/browsing environment mean it cannot win longer term (unless they do he said humbly).

The competition has a little time the market will move slowly to iPhone but there could be 50 million on the street by the end of next year.  Remember Jobs pointed out that 1% of the 1 billion unit per year market by the end of 2008.  10% world wide or 100 million a year will not happen overnight but the forces that could lead to that conclusion are undeniable and very powerful.