Telephia’s new Mobile Internet Report states that the 191 million U.S. wireless phone subscribers are increasingly using the mobile internet, with 4.8% (9.2 million) using the mobile internet.

Telephia maintains a panel of 69,000 wireless subscribers in the United States that it samples each month for mobile phone research. For the month of June 2005, more than 1,200 selected panelists responded to questions about their mobile internet usage and demographics. Weather-related sites were accessed by 3.9% of the total wireless audience, 2.9% visited a search site and 2.5% visited a sports related site.

The tables below, sourced from Telephia Audience Metrics, provide more details on the high-level results.

Click for Table 1
Click for Table 2

The walled gardens of many carriers likely account for a portion of the reason that portals ranked so low, but there may be another reason. Today’s handsets (hardware and interfaces) make accessing mobile content extremely difficult for the average user.

Given the complexity of mobile surfing and a user’s general limited disposable time when mobile, users are defaulting to the information that they have the greatest need for and can access quickly. General research clearly shows that city guides/maps/directions are extremely valuable to consumer and business users. However, limited use maps provided by the Google/Yahoo/Mapquest at minimal costs or supported by advertising differ when compared to more involved location services. Along the same cost/benefit lines, current mobile devices are difficult for extensive reading of news, stock reports, etc.

On the other hand, access to email via a mobile device is relatively simple on most carriers with a capable handset. We believe that users are not reading or writing large amounts of emails on their phones. They are likely using their phones as a type of mobile alert system and reading select messages. SMS has become widely popular because of its simplicity, but it requires the sender to use their phone and compose a short message. Mobile access to email, though, does not require a sender to guess what device you have ready access to and allows them to send the full details.

Telephia’s report simply provides details on users and what applications they use. It is up to you to determine your own explanations for this usage.