90% of top Irish company websites 'unsuitable for mobiles'
More than 90% of Ireland’s Top 1,000 companies have web sites unsuitable for use on a mobile phone, according to research published today.
Of the 845 company web sites tested, just 6% were found to provide a successful mobile experience for a user.
The remainder had websites unsuitable for use on a mobile phone for a range of reasons, including size, structure and quality, according to dotMobie, the official worldwide registry for the .mobi domain.
"With more than four phones sold to every PC sold in the world, it is shocking that accessing the internet on a mobile phone has not yet taken off," said Neil Edwards, CEO of Dublin-based dotMobi.
For the study - based on The Irish Times’ list of the top 1,000 Irish companies in 2006 - dotMobi simulated a mobile device accessing each company’s home page and other common address patterns often used to host mobile content.
Each page was assigned an overall score from one (worst) to five (best) for the mobile readiness of each page, based on industry standards.
The average Irish score was 1.5, providing sub-standard mobile experience, compared with 3.6 for worldwide .mobi sites.
The average estimated time taken to download a company’s mobile page (over GPRS) was a lengthy 15.9 seconds, and the average estimated cost was 60c.
"Clearly, the majority of Irish sites scored poorly and there is room for improvement," he added.
Multinational companies based in Ireland scored best in the study. The highest scoring live sites were Ericsson’s ericsson.mobi scoring 4.81, closely followed by Google Ireland’s google.ie scoring 4.66.
Tests can be repeated by readers using the publicly accessible "Mobile Ready Report" at http://ready.mobi.
Separately, dotMobi today announced more than 400,000 .mobi domains have been registered in 104 countries since the domain's launch in October 2006.
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