PCs Rule: UK surfers show no bias towards wireless

NEWS UK users still favour the humble PC over mobile devices when accessing the internet and an increasing number of surfers are logging on through games consoles. The latest internet ratings from Jupiter MMXI show that between April and June this year, six out of ten people in the UK regularly logged on to the internet. 61 per cent of respondents preferred logging on from home computers. Over ten per cent of web users claimed to log on from a WAP phone but just 1.6 per cent said they used PDAs. However, Simon Buckingham, senior analyst with mobile research house Mobile Stream, challenged the ten per cent figure, claiming it seemed too good to be true. "I really doubt ten per cent of internet users used a WAP phone. It seems too high. But it doesn't really matter who's using WAP, the wider picture is whether people are making any money out of it, and frankly they're not," he said. He added that through promotions during the survey period, such as Big Brother, WAP use could have artificially been boosted. The survey also found that digital TV and games consoles are increasingly being used to access the web. Three million people accessed the internet via games consoles in the three month period, an increase of one million on the previous quarter. Access through digital TV set top boxes grew by half a million in the period up to one and a half million users.