New research from Hostway, which questioned 1,484 consumers in Great Britain, found that uptake of mobile phone based Internet access remains minimal. Roughly 75% don't access the Internet from their phones, highlighting slow loading and navigation problems as the primary cause:

It found that of those who do use the internet on the go, 38 per cent are annoyed that pages load too slowly, while over a quarter think sites are too hard to navigate on small screens. Nine out of 10, however, agreed that they would use mobile internet services if sites displayed correctly and accessing them didn't incur a high cost.

"This research highlights a real problem with 'mobile internet' as it stands right now. Although many people have internet-ready phones or PDAs that can access the internet, they are not inclined to do so because of the problems with displaying or navigating the content," said Neil Barton, director, Hostway.

Email was the most frequently requested service, with over 70 per cent wanting to access their mail from their handset. Just under half would like to be able to view maps, while 47 per cent are interested in keeping up with news and sport. Consumers were also interested in finding out cinema times and bar and restaurant information while out and about.

We couldn't agree more, modern 3G/3.5G mobile phones have huge content related potential, yet to date the majority of operators have failed to develop it. Interestingly cost isn’t mentioned, which is certainly a factor with more modern services.

No doubt one of the problems comes from the fact that all mobiles are not equal, with an abundance of inferior models (smaller screens, poor browsers) forcing operators into developing restricted content so that it can be viewed universally. More @ VNUNet.