Tracking Mobile Web Use at InetDaemon.Com

I decided to take a look at the statistics for InetDaemon.Com with an eye towards looking for mobile users to see if access to my site corresponded to trends I saw elsewhere.  I have a tool called AWSTATS installed which logs the basic TCP and HTTP transaction information for all accesses to the website.  This provides me a fairly comprehensive look at what sorts of computerized devices are accessing my website.

By far, the first thing that I found interesting was the number of Symbian OS users who were accessing my site. Non-geeks should know that the vast majority of devices running the Symbian Operating System are mobile devices, mostly smartphones that have been er, ‘liberated’ from the provider’s software and are running Symbian OS instead.  InetDaemon.Com has always been a ‘geeks website’ and true to form, it is the geeks that do the majority of the surfing via mobile devices here, but there are over 2000 other users using their unmodified cell phones to access InetDaemon.com.

InetDaemon.Com Mobile Usage Data for 2009

I’m not really able to track the iPhone.  The iPhone reports that it is a “Safari” browser with a “Mobile” value in the HTTP_USER_AGENT string, which I don’t have in my logs.  I have 2.5% of my traffic (437,748 hits) that comes from computers running Safari browsers, but Safari runs on Windows and the Mac, as well as the iPhone and those entries don’t have ‘mobile’ in them. 

I can say that there were 5183 Symbian OS users browsing the site in 2009 and that I have a LOT of Geeks surfing my site from phones they liberated from their cellular providers’ featureless software. As the table shows, the number of Symbian OS users far outstrips that of the standard smartphone browsers.  Are you using an iPhone, Droid, Blackberry Storm, Nokia N8 or Nokia X6, T-Mobile G1 or another device running Symbian OS?  Drop me a message!