Men dominate mobile web

Men use the mobile web more than women, though this disparity will change over time as accessing the web on smaller devices becomes more common.

That's according to Opera Software, which released its State of the Mobile Web report today.

Nearly 85 per cent of people in the UK currently using the mobile web at the moment are male, Opera found, though the ratio of men to women will decrease over time, the company expects.

"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," said Jon von Tetzchner, chief executive officer of Opera Software.

"We will see how these numbers change in time as more people discover the absolute convenience of browsing the web on their mobile phones," von Tetzchner continued.

Opera also looked at what people do on the mobile web and found that people in the UK were visiting Yahoo and Google's sites the most often, though news sites such as the BBC and social networks including Facebook also figured in the top 10.

Online auction house eBay and the community encylopaedia, Wikipedia, were also popular with mobile surfers.

Opera also recently released its new Desktop browser, Opera 9.5. It claimed 4.5 million downloads on Tuesday of this week, a number that has subsequently been overshadowed by the eight million downloads of Firefox 3 in the first 24 hours after its release.

www.opera.com