Mobile web marketing outfit AdMob has released a report on global smartphone traffic for last month.
According to the report, 34% of mobile web traffic came from, you guessed it, a BlackBerry (and in most cases a Pearl). Running in a close second with 29% of handheld web access was global handset market leader (and our European friends) Nokia, and at the bottom of the scale it was another disappointment for Motorola who picked up just 1%.
Where the stats become a little more interesting is in respect of the iPhone where no actual figures were produced (iPhone pay off for a gagging order)?? Apparently iPhone traffic for February had “flattened” though, which falls in line with other reports that (now the hype and honeymoon is over) people have lost interest in the Jesus Phone.
Looking at mobile web ad requests in specific territories (which of course is what AdMob was most interested in) we can see that Motorola came top with 35% of all ad requests and, for my friends on this side of the pond, Sony Ericsson claimed the top spot in the UK with 37% of all ad requests.
AdMob doesn’t produce any stats for the iPhone because hardly anybody uses it to browse mobile web pages.
You see AdMob specializes in advertisements for websites and landing pages created specifically for the mobile web. These are sites geared toward WAP browsers and small screened handsets like Razrs. Even devices with so called full HTML browsers make use of the mobile web out of necessity due to weak page rendering and low data speeds.
iPhone users, however, are able to take advantage of the full internet and have no need for kiddie websites (like the one pictured on the BlackBerry above in this article).
So while it barely registers a blip on AdMob’s radar, you can look to trackers such as StatCounter who specialize in the real internet where the big boys play. Just a couple of days ago they stated the iPhone’s Safari browser to be #1 in the United States for mobile devices and #2 in the UK behind Nokia.
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/03/18/iphones_safari_already_the_no_1_us_mobile_browser_says_firm.html
And NetApplications released stats late last year that showed iPhone browsing in North America only bested by actual computer users (the BlackBerry was nowhere to be found).
http://blogs.computerworld.com/iphone_browsing_marketshare_closes_in_on_1
I don’t see AdMob’s figures as a sign of flattening on the iPhone’s behalf.
I think that I am inclined to agree on MacVicta on this one. One of the brilliant things about safari on the iPhone (i give credit where credit is due) is that it renders full web pages by default. You would have to manually point to a sites wap site to register a hit from the iPhone version of Safari.
I call bull on this one. Here is an article that has 50 times more iphone searches then for any other device.
http://www.macworld.co.uk/ipod-itunes/news/index.cfm?newsid=20446