While somewhat contrary to current industry thinking, this approach to making the mobile a viable and valuable web platform has the support of the most important players: consumers.

Michael Björn, researcher for Ericsson ConsumerLab, studied responses from 1550 active mobile web users in the mature markets of the US, the UK and Japan to come up with the finding.

The key result is that the PC and the mobile are still seen as belonging to separate worlds: PCs are being used for uploading and downloading content, storage and playback, while mobiles are chosen for pictures and peer-group-related media.

Not surprisingly then, mobile consumers want mobile web services that tie into their physical space, such as music recognition and the ability to purchase transport or entertainment tickets, and provide peer interaction, including address-book-related applications that make it simpler to find and communicate with friends.

"We have the view that what happens in the PC has to happen in the mobile phone," Björn says. "Instead, we need to support people's current behavior, but improve the experience just a little, so they continue to do what they do today but what they pull out of their pocket to buy something, or connect to someone, is their mobile phone."

"We have a very strong focus on creating traffic in the network. There are two ways to do that: the first is to focus on services that imply large amounts of data, such as 'mobile broadband'. The other way is to provide an experience for people so that whatever they are about to do, they think: 'I can probably do this with my mobile.' While this may not initially create a lot of traffic, ultimately people will reach for the phone for everything, whether it is heavy or light from a traffic perspective."

The added advantage of this approach is that, by using their phones more and more for web-based activities, consumers overcome widespread concern that mobile internet access is too expensive and burns through their batteries.