Although many mobile site owners stabilized their WAP offerings during the holiday season, there were still some underperforming wireless Web properties, according to Gomez.

The readiness scores for mobile sites in the banking, search and airline category did not change from November. However, just because there was not any change in readiness does not mean mobile sites are in tip-top shape.

?At the end of the year, mobile site owners may have stabilized their mobile Web offerings during the holiday season,? said Matt Poepsel, vice president of performance strategies at Gomez, Lexington, MA. ?There are still too many underperforming mobile Web properties, so we hope to begin seeing improvements again in January.?

The performance benchmarks from Gomez and dotMobi take into account different aspects of mobile Web performance for sites in the airline, banking and search industries.

Banking and airlines
Bank of America and Wells Fargo received four bars out of a possible five.

On the other hand, Chase and U.S. Bank received two out of five.

Mobile Web sites for JetBlue and Southwest received a perfect score of five bars.

Continental and Northwest received three bars out of five.

AirTran, American and U.S. Airways received a rating of two out of five bars.

Mr. Poespsel said mobile banking sites were faster and more consistent on average than mobile airline sites during the month of December.

However, airline sites fared better in terms of discoverability ? the number and nature of mobile Web addresses supported ? than the banks.

?This would indicate that banks have chosen to support fewer mobile addresses, but they?re providing high levels of performance for the ones they do support,? Mr. Poespel said.

Search and retail
Google and Yahoo both received four out five bars.

Amazon, AOL, eBay and MSN received three out of five and MySpace received two bars.

Ask.com came in last, only getting one out of five bars.

The average availability of measured retail sites was 99.45 percent.

Buy.com was available for 99.96 percent of the time, Amazon 99.4 percent and Overstock.com at 99.2 percent.

Amazon had the lowest response time at 1.90 seconds. The average was 3.61 seconds.

Mr. Poespel said it remains clear that a mobile Web site needs to perform adequately in all areas, starting with discoverability.

If a consumer enters a URL and fails to receive the expected Web site, he or she may not try another but rather assume the company does not have a mobile site as part of its strategy.

Mr. Poespel said readiness and technical performance are also critically important to brands, as frustrated consumers are unlikely to fight through a challenging mobile Web experience.

?Mobile site owners should use the year-end as a chance to take stock of mobile Web performance in 2009,? Mr. Poespel said. ?These site owners now have a historic baseline.

?They should use this baseline to set goals and ensure that all dimensions of mobile Web experience are supporting their company?s mobile strategy and not putting it at risk,? he said.