At Mobify, it's always exciting to see new devices making a splash on our network! We're also always excited to post statistics from our network - yup, we're a bunch of geeks. We hope you'll find this interesting too, though!

The Nexus S is especially easy to segment right now, since it's the only Android 2.3 phone out there on the market. Here's the growth in Nexus S activity we're seeing on our network:

Looks like people had a lot of fun with their phones on Christmas day!  There's a little lull afterwards (too many turkey dinners?) and then we see steady traffic growth into January.

So where do these lucky people live?  If you thought "Mountainview", you're not too far off.

Nexus S traffic comparison within top 7 cities

These top 7 cities make up about 25% of global Nexus S activity on the Mobify network. Looks like Londoners are actively jumping onboard the Android bandwagon, neck-to-neck with Angelinos. Of course, if we add up San Francisco, Alameda and Mountain View, we account for 32% of traffic from the top 7, about one and a half times either LA or London. After those three, Chicago shows it's colors next as a tech hub.

Here's a table of the top 15 cities:

1. London
2. Los Angeles
3. New York
4. San Francisco
5. Alameda
6. Chicago
7. Mountain View
8. Houston
9. Seattle
10. Dublin
11. Atlanta
12. Philadelphia
13. Paris
14. Minneapolis
15. Phoenix

Do you think this data tells us anything about the distribution of Android's biggest fans?

We've spent some time combing through our analytics data for Q4 2010. Over the next few days we'll share some of the key nuggets that we've extracted from the data set. In terms of overall trends, we've seen a lot of growth across our network in 2010. From September to December we saw 41% growth in pageviews from European visitors and 36% growth from North American visitors. This reflects both an increase in traffic to individual Mobify subscribers and the ongoing expansion of the Mobify network. We'll start today with relative device data.

We've heard a lot of announcements from various mobile data sources concerning the relative traffic from different mobile device operating systems. Here's what we're seeing on our network.

The graphs above show relative OS share in pageview requests for the Americas and for Europe. In both cases, the four operating systems shown in the graphs account for more than 90% of all page views. The iOS operating system (iPhone and iPod) remains the dominant OS across the Mobify network accounting for half or more of all page requests. Otherwise browser share is relatively steady. There is a small contraction in BlackBerry pageviews in North America, and slow growth in Android pageviews in both Europe and North America. Although other variations are noticeable, they aren't large enough to draw any conclusions.

A couple of days ago, Peter-Paul Koch kicked off a debate concerning zooming on mobile optimized sites. 

On mobile zooming is a fundamental human right. Any silly site that locks zooming will be ... dunno what, but something very bad.

— Peter-Paul Koch (@ppk) November 2, 2010

Given the de-facto standard amongst mobile optimized sites on the web today is to prevent zooming, PPK is definitely swimming up stream with this opinion.  I love that! :) Has the mobile design world really been heading in the wrong direction all this time?  Since we spend pretty much all day thinking about the mobile web here at Mobify, his tweet raised some eyebrows here and led to a great discussion about the value of zooming.  I'll talk about our conclusions, as well as some new features Mobify has to empower site designers.

Before I weigh in on the subject, it makes sense to answer two questions.  1)  Why would a visitor to a mobile optimized site want to zoom on content?  and 2) Why would a mobile site designer want to prevent zooming?

Let's begin by addressing the first question.  The zoom metaphor was introduced in mobile browsers as a way to mitigate the small but pixel-dense displays available on mobile devices.  By zooming, the site visitor can make text more readable, and see more detail in images.  I'll leave out other rich media - if a video or flash element is consuming a significant chunk of visitor attention, these elements will tend to be full-screen.  Since all modern mobile browsers integrate zoom functionality, explicitly blocking it contravenes what is becoming an established convention.

So why would designers want to prevent zooming?  First, it makes navigation faster on touch devices.  When a mobile visitor makes a swipe gesture, there's only one axis for interpreting the input.  It prevents accidentally scrolling content offscreen in a horizontal way.  Children and young-adults may find precise swipe gestures trivial, but for the majority of adults, the swipe interaction method is very new, and inaccurate swipes are common.  Second -- unlike a desktop browser, designers of mobile sites can have complete confidence that the web browser is occupying the entire screen real-estate, and for modern smart phones, they can be certain the screen has a minimum virtual width of 320 pixels.  This lets designers custom-tailor the site, including navigation and site-branding for a specific size.  Tremendous effort is expended on desktop sites designing around not knowing how wide or how tall the browser will be.  Many sites don't even make the attempt and use fixed layouts.  You could say a fixed-layout on desktop is similar to a mobile site that doesn't allow zooming, but in fact that's not the case.  On mobile, at least in the case of 90+% of smart phones in use today, you can make safe assumptions about what will happen when you set a non-scalable device-width viewport.  No such assumption holds for desktop browsers.

If a designer does a good job with the type-face, is there a reason for zooming?  In some cases, there might be.  Site visitors with visual impairments, for example, might want much larger text than what would be optimal for a typical visitor.  An image might include high-resolution detail that a mobile visitor would like to zoom on.  (That said, most high-quality mobile sites lower the resolution of images for mobile visitors to speed up 3G load times.)

Can we have the best of both worlds?  Sure!  Mobify has created a widget designers can add to their site which allows visitors to enable and disable pinch/zoom on their mobile optimized site.  Mobify also includes a feature which when enabled, automatically wraps anchor tags around images and lets visitors click on the image for a full-resolution version.  These widgets will be available in the next release of Mobify Studio, look for the announcement soon.