Retailers are set to break records for m-commerce transactions in the Christmas trading period, experts predict. Of all search queries, 15 per cent take place on mobile devices, up from seven per cent last year.

Research by Latitude Digital Marketing found that smartphones accounted for approximately seven per cent of all paid-search clicks in the UK in the third quarter and tablet devices made up three per cent of clicks.

The total number of UK mobile web users is expected to reach 30 million by the end of 2012, the report said. However, despite the expected success of m-commerce, Discovery analyst Matt Haydock concluded that an overall m-commerce Christmas remained a way off.

New mobile technologies, such as voice search on the iPhone 4S, and Google Goggles, a mobile app that allows you to search using pictures of products taken on their phone, will make mobile advertising more desirable.

Research published by Forrester this week found UK consumers use the mobile internet more often than their European counterparts.

Nearly one in three (31 per cent) of UK adults use the mobile Internet at least monthly, compared with the European average of 19 per cent. The Forrester research was based on surveys of more than 330,000 consumers in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific.

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