Mobile. Still the next big thing
Things have changed fast in the mobile market in the last year and the transformation is not stopping anytime soon. A report released this morning by the mobile ad firm AdMob puts the growth of the mobile market over the last year into perspective. ReadWriteWeb reports:
Believe it or not, it was only a year ago that the Motorola RAZR scored as the number one phone here in the U.S. while the iPhone was the only touchscreen device to even make the list of top ten handsets. Only a year later, and so much has changed. Now half of the top ten are touchscreen devices, six include Wi-Fi capabilities, and six have mobile application stores. And as you would expect, this new crop of super-powered phones are making heavy use of the mobile web.
The report also provides great insight into the growth in mobile web usage by the iPhone and iPod Touch (19 times in the last year) as well as handset and OS trends:
Now climbing up the charts, Google’s Android, the newcomer to the mobile operating system game, is beginning to have an impact on mobile web traffic as well. From August to September of 2009, the percentage of smartphone traffic generated by devices running the Android OS grew a whopping 13% over the course of the month. That’s a dramatic increase in such a short period of time and gives credence to recent reports that Android is poised to become the number two smartphone in the worldwide market. While still far behind the iPhone OS in terms of traffic with only 17% of U.S. traffic and only 10% of traffic worldwide, Google’s mobile OS is already beating out competitors like RIM, the maker of Blackberry devices, and Windows Mobile. It has also claimed two spots on the top 10 chart of handset models in the U.S with the HTC Dream coming in at number 3 and the HTC Magic coming in at number 10. Worldwide, the Dream is also number 3, but the Magic only makes it to spot number 15.
Read more analysis of the report at ReadWriteWeb.com.