Thursday, June 19, 2008

Opera Finds Men Outnumber Women on Mobile Web

Opera Software's latest "State of the Mobile Web" report published today reveals an interesting trend -- that men outnumber women on the mobile Web almost nine to one. The company's May report essentially looked at what people do on the mobile Web, this one looks at demographic trends.

And it shines a light on the most popular sports Web sites on the mobile Web -- what with the UEFA Euro 2008 football tourney happening this month and the Olympics following thereafter.

The report, available at: ttp://www.opera.com/mobile_report/2008/05/, is based on aggregate and anonymous statistics from Opera Mini servers with all percentages based on a snapshot of the top 100 Web sites for each region. Voluntary user surveys conducted between Feb and Jun have helped collect demographic data.

Explaining the difference between the May and June report, Jon von Tetzchner, chief executive officer of Opera, said, "In the previous report, we looked at what people did on the mobile Web. With this next report, we look at who uses the mobile Web. Because accessing the Web on mobile devices will become more pervasive than accessing the Web with computers, we expect that over time one gender or one age range will not dominate. We will see how these numbers change in time as more people discover the absolute convenience of browsing the Web on their mobile phones."

Opera Mini is known as the world's most popular Web browser for mobile phones, and runs on more than 800 different handsets, making it available to the widest range of consumers worldwide. Almost every phone with Java can run Opera Mini. The Web browser is completely free for anyone to download and use, available from http://www.operamini.com/.

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