Globally, the Web is mainly mobile already!

Here in the US, we talk about the fixed and mobile Web to sound cutting-edge (or at least to show that we get that more and more people access the Web from cellphones as much as from computers). But in huge swaths of the rest of the world, the Web is already mostly mobile and accessed from regular ol’ cellphones, because “in countries where the average daily wage is less than many in the United States spend on their daily coffee fix, iPhones or BlackBerrys are beyond even luxury,” PC World reports. “In places such as Nigeria, India, Indonesia, and others … most of the phones consistently appearing in the top 10 handset lists are feature phones, which is to say they are traditional form-factor phones involving a numeric keypad, small non-touch screen, and some added-in gimmick such as (usually) MP3 playback.” And even still, those pre-smartphone little handsets are people’s primary means of using the Web for everything from socializing to researching to keeping up on the news to banking. Think in terms of our economic future when you read this conclusion of the PC World piece: “The future of IT is going to be one of flexibility [and mobility], and companies [and countries (and maybe even schools?!)] that lack this approach will lack a competitive edge. Workers will need to be able to access their data anywhere, and on practically any device.”