I still run into a few people that don’t think the iPhone is all that great of a user experience. Well, it looks like the hard data is telling a different story. It appears that iPhone owners are using the Internet many times more than their non-iPhone counterparts. At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Google revealed that there are 50 times more searches originating from the iPhone than any other mobile handset. This finding has also been reported by O2 who found that 60% of U.K. iPhone users are sending or receiving more than 25 MB of data a month.

From a user experience perspective, this is quite amazing. For years, many companies in the mobile arena have been building mobile hardware and mobile UI’s that they’ve deemed usable and now Apple comes along and is getting 50X the usage. Incredible! There was obviously room for improvement. I can see why Google originally thought the high iPhone usage was a mistake…

“We thought it was a mistake and made our engineers check the logs again,” Vic Gundotra, head of Google’s mobile operations told the Financial Times.

For US carriers, increasing the average revenue per user (ARPU) has been the new financial target as voice revenues are steady or decreasing. They need to find ways to make their mobile data services more attractive. Besides the obtuse pay-as-you-go vs. all-you-can-eat data pricing models, mobile users have had to deal with the walled-garden decks, poor hard-key usability, unclear soft-key button labels and maze-like navigational paths. It’s no wonder that users have stayed away from the mobile web. Personally, I’d rather use my laptop.

“The world is changing. Users want an internet without fences. They know how to type in
Google.com if they want to get to it. Two years ago the operators were still playing the role of
gatekeepers but that is no longer the role for them,” Mr Gundotra said.

It looks like ux does matter when it comes to mobile data services. Let’s see which approach everyone takes moving forward.  I hope the sequel is not going to be an “Attack of the iPhone Clones”.