Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Useful stats?

QuicklyBored have directly reprinted MobileRated's press release of their top 10 phones for downloads (I like QB, but I wish they'd make the division between PR reprinting and editorial clearer); of all the non-news pretexts for a press release MobileRated could have come up with to get some free publicity this would appear to be one of the most useful. However does it really tell us much? Two of the absolute latest Blackberries in the top 10 phones for content downloads? Maybe, but I'd be surprised...

The fact that handset number 5, the Sony-Ericsson K810, does not exist (outside the confines of student imagination) also makes me question the figures a lot, though presumably they meant W810 and just didn't bother to proof-read or don't know much about phones.

The presence of the 6620 suggests we're looking mainly at the US market here, the rest are all very new phones except the 6600 (lovely phone for development) and the ubiquitous chav phone.

All this leads me to one conclusion. If this really represents MobileRated's top 10 phones downloading their games, they are only being checked out by advertising and marketing execs owning the newest / most fashionable top-end phones. This is the only group I have seen who really do all have handsets like this, so maybe this is telling us something - just not what they wanted to reveal ;) Maybe we could see some more quantitive download figures?


UPDATE: finally found that very useful Bango popular handsets page - a nice public counterweight to the suggestion that people who download mobile games only have the absolute latest and greatest handsets. Real people downloading content appear to use a mixture of phones from across the spectrum, so MobileRated appear to be missing out on a lot of their target audience right now. It remains to be seen whether people reading their press release will realise what they're really being told.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Why are you blaming MobileRated for a type on QuicklyBored?! The MobileRated press release says W810i, not K810i.

The following URL gives the latest numbers, so it might not sync with the press release in question but, yes, it appears most of the traffic is from the USA (not a surprise is it?).

http://www.mobilerated.com/developer/downloads/downloads.html

As for being the lastest, high-end, phones, I suspect it's because it's a free site. Most downloads are probably to peoples PC's for side-loading to avoid airtime charges, something you can't do with many lower-end phones, and something that pay sites usually don't allow.

What I'd like to see is the number web users, versus the number of WAP users. THAT would be interesting.

2:14 am

 

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