What is mobile?

Jo Alcock ♦ November 7, 2011 ♦ 1 Comment

One of the main purposes of this project is to gather evidence including case studies and examples of good practice around mobile technology in libraries. But what do we mean by mobile?

Mobile phones are becoming ubiquitous in today’s society in the UK, in fact according to Ofcom’s latest statistics (checked November 2011), 91% of the adult UK population personally own or use a mobile phone.

In addition to mobile phones, there have been a number of new products released in the tablet market including iPad, Samsung Galaxy, Motorola Xoom, Blackberry Playbook, and Amazon Kindle Fire. This has resulted in a growth in the number of tablet computer owners, many of whom are using these whilst out and about (i.e. mobile).

Many people are also utilising mobile devices such as mobile phones and tablets to access the internet – the July 2011 Tecmark report on Mobile and UK web traffic found that 12.59% of all web traffic was from mobile devices (increasing at a rapid rate – up from 8.09% in January 2011). The graph below demostrates the growth in mobile web access in recent years:

From Tecmark report (click for full report)

For the purposes of the m-library support project, we are including all types of mobile devices including:

• mobile phones
• tablet computers
• e-readers
• PDAs…