More proof, if any were needed, that Korea and Japan are the leaders when it comes to accessing the Internet via mobile devices. According to survey by Marketing Inside last week, more than half (53.5%) of all Koreans use the mobile Internet "from time to time". And over in Japan, a majority of people in a survey by infoPLANT last month said that they access social networking sites and blogs via mobile.

Of the 100,752 people surveyed in Korea, around 14 percent use their phones to access the Internet once a month, while 20.8 percent said two or three times per month, according to a report in The Korea Times. It added that 5.8 percent used wireless web service over 11 times each month.

"The poll shows people are taking advantage of the mobile Internet more briskly than any other country, where the wireless web has yet to take off," Marketing Inside official Shim Shi-won was quoted as saying.

The Korea Times noted that, broken down by wireless operators, subscribers to the business-oriented SK Telecom use the mobile Internet most often, at 56.1 percent. Users of the runner-up player KTF followed with 51.2 percent but the third-ranked LG Telecom failed to reach the 50-percent mark at 48.4 percent.

The  newspaper said that, according to the survey, the most popular service used was the downloading of ring tones, followed by the transmission of multimedia files such as pictures and games. However, it also noted that people were found to be reluctant to purchase products or trade stocks through the wireless Internet.

Over in Japan, meanwhile, its blogs and social networking sites that are being accessed. The web site What Japan Thinks (whatjapanthinks.com) translates some of the more popular polls from Japanese into English and summarises the results. In the poll by infoPLANT, more people accessed such sites from their mobile phones than via PC.

However, as the site noted, the survey is likely skewed in favour of mobile users given that it was conducted via the DoCoMo iMode menu. Of the 3709 people that responded, more than half said that they accessed blogs either exclusively (32%) or mostly(23%) from a mobile phone. A similar result came in for social networking sites.

The majority of respondents also thought their use of mobiles to access blogs and SNS would increase in the future. The full translated survey is at: http://whatjapanthinks.com/2007/06/12/mobile-phone-based-blogging-snsing-beats-pc

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