Mobile web still causing pain

Web portal Yahoo! offers the mobile web experience, according to research published by the Strategy Analytics Wireless Media Lab on Monday.

In terms of mobile experience, Yahoo! beat Google, Napster, YouTube and MySpace, after participants carried out a set number of tasks specific to each provider on both a laptop PC and a wireless device.

Yahoo! scored just over 90 out of 100 on its traditional web experience via a PC, keeping pace with Google and MySpace. But the Yahoo! mobile experience scored almost 80, thrashing Google and MySpace by almost 20 points.

“Yahoo! Mobile achieved the highest rating, primarily due to the fact that it represented the best replication of the full website on the third (mobile) screen,” said Paul Brown, user experience analyst at Strategy Analytics.

However, the analyst acknowledged that “the mobile implementation of these brands is tangibly inferior to the fixed user experience across a range of metrics.”

YouTube scored just shy of 90 for its PC-based experience, while the mobile version came in at around 75.

However, Napster threw up an interesting result. The Napster mobile portal scored higher than the PC-based version at 72, seven points higher than its fixed line parent.

Strategy Analytics said that many users are showing a preference for web search, web mail and web 2.0, user generated and social networking content over branded content.

“However ease of access and discoverability of content on mobile handsets continue to be a huge pain point which is directly limiting content consumption,” the analyst said.