iPhone Takes Global Lead in Mobile Browser Wars

This is confusing. I thought the iPhone had about 1% of the smartphone market. Opera makes both Opera Mobile and Opera Mini (which runs on smartphones and dumb phones). The post mentions Nokia and BlackBerry as browsers. Many of these devices run Opera Mini as their browsers. How can a phone with a 1% market share, let's double that to 2% if you include iTouch, have 24% of the global browser market? Is a BlackBerry running Opera Mini counted as a BlackBerry or as Opera Mini.

Methinks this was written by an iFan.

 

While the iPhone is a small share of the overall smartphone market, this survey is measuring usage via the traffic to sites and the browsers that are identified automatically when you surf the net. So while the number of iPhone users may be small, there are a lot of people with Blackberries, etc, who don't surf the net much.

 

Here's another survey on this topic as well as the link to download the complete report, and the InformationWeek article about it...


iPhone Drives 50% Of U.S. Mobile Web Traffic

Apple's iPhone dominates the mobile Web in the U.S. market, but Google's Android is coming on strong.

By Marin Perez
InformationWeek
March 24, 2009 05:52 PM

Apple iPhone users in the United States are more likely to surf the Web than Android, BlackBerry, or Windows Mobile users, according to data released by AdMob.

The mobile advertising company compared data from more than 6,000 publishers and found that the iPhone accounts for about 50% of mobile Web traffic in the U.S. market and 33% of worldwide traffic. Apple's smartphone is widely considered to have one of the top mobile browsers. While the data is not definitive because it only measures AdMob's network, it's an indicator of mobile Web usage patterns.

Google (NSDQ: GOOG)'s Android operating system also had a relatively strong showing, as it has captured 5% of the market. This is a decent showing considering there's only one Android device, the T-Mobile G1, and it was released about five months ago. The Linux-based mobile OS was built with Internet connectivity in mind, and it has deep integration with the search company's Web services.

Research In Motion (NSDQ: RIMM)'s BlackBerry platform placed second for mobile traffic, with 21% of the U.S. market. While the BlackBerry Curve is a common handset for browsing the Web, RIM lost 11% market share since AdMob's August report.

Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)'s Windows Mobile placed third with 13% of traffic, and Palm held on to 7% thanks to the success of the Centro. Globally, Symbian had been the leading OS for mobile Web usage, but it's quickly ceding ground to the iPhone. In the August report, Symbian had 64% of the market; it has fallen to 43%.


SW