In 2015, 60% of phones will sport Internet

.
Another day another mobile web report, and this time it’s from ABI Research, claiming that 60% of mobile phones will be Internet-enabled by 2015.
With so much attention falling on smart phones these days, it’s sometimes a shock to realize that in fact, most phones today are not blessed with the miracles of the mobile web, although the number is creeping up.
“The mobile browser market is undergoing significant change as the mobile web makes the transition from what some would call a “poor man’s Internet” to a full-fledged web experience,” declares the report’s abstract.
ABI goes on to point out that “full Internet browsing is not the whole story for mobile browsing.” Really? How so? Well, according to the authors of the report, “it is becoming clear that specific use cases exist for three distinct categories of mobile browsers: full Internet browsers (FIBs), proxy-based browsers (PBBs) and WAP browsers.”
And then of course there’s the veritable plethora of devices considered “mobile;” media tablets, MIDs, personal media players, personal navigation devices, gaming devices and eBook readers.
ABI’s number crunchers have apparently calculated that in five years the total number of web-enabled phones should reach 3.8 billion, most likely spurred on by some rather speedy triple-digit growth in Africa as well as mobile Internet booms in China, India and Brazil.
Unsurprisingly, ABI posits that full Internet browsers will be on all smart phones and a “growing number of enhanced (or feature) phones.”
In terms of smart phones, ABI says the full Internet is the way to go because of the handset’s “advanced application processors, expanded memory capacity and adequate screen size and resolution.” Indeed, a full Internet browser typically requires about 64 Mb of memory to run, and a key to mobile Internet growth is the falling cost of sophisticated applications processors.
Meanwhile, proxy-based browsers can easily be built into even low-cost feature phones.  “These browsers move some caching and processing off the phone to a nearby server, allowing the browser to run on lower-cost processors and requiring as little as 4 Mb of memory. That means these browsers can be used on even the lowest-cost phones,” explains ABI senior analyst Mark Beccue.