Smartphone Market Share Increased Rapidly Worldwide According to AdMob

Mobile advertising agency, AdMob has reported that despite challenging economic conditions, smartphones continued to gain significant market share worldwide over the past six months, rising from 26 percent to 33 percent of hits to its adserver platform in February 2009.

The launch of the HTC Dream (G1) and BlackBerry Storm propelled increases in Android and RIM Operating System requests in the USA. This growth is based on mobile Web usage, not the number of handsets sold, and demonstrates the high consumer engagement with these touchscreen devices. The top handsets on AT&T and Sprint are also touchscreen devices, the iPhone and the Samsung Instinct.

Other highlights from the February 2009 AdMob Mobile Metrics Report:

• Worldwide the top five smartphones are the iPhone, Nokia N70, BlackBerry 8300, Nokia N80, and Nokia N73. The top five US smartphones are the iPhone, BlackBerry Curve, BlackBerry Pearl, Palm Centro, and HTC Dream (G1).
• The BlackBerry Curve has overtaken the Pearl as the number one RIM device. The BlackBerry Storm is the number one device on Verizon with 14 percent of requests.
• Symbian lost market share, but is still number one worldwide with 43 percent of requests. The top 10 Symbian devices have not changed in the past six months.
• The Samsung BlackJack II is the top Windows Mobile device worldwide. Six of the top 10 Windows Mobile devices are from HTC.
• Android accounts for 5 percent of the US smartphone market.
• iPhone generated 33 percent of smartphone traffic worldwide and 50 percent in the US.
• 97 percent of BlackBerry requests came from their OS Version 4.2 or higher. These devices will all have access to BlackBerry App World when it goes live.
• Symbian and Windows Mobile have a significant percentage of their user base on devices running old versions of their OS. These devices many not have access to their application stores when they launch later this year.

AdMob stores and analyzes handset and operator data from every ad request in its network to optimize ad serving. Each month, the Mobile Metrics Report aggregates this data to provide insights into major trends in the mobile ecosystem.

Posted to the site on 24th March 2009