The latest Mobile Metrics Report from mobile advertising firm AdMob confirms what we’ve been seeing over the last year or so: the smartphone market largely belongs to Apple and Google from a platform perspective. It also reveals that “feature” phones have capitulated to smartphones for mobile ad requests, reflecting the growth of smartphones as they slowly begin a march toward dominating the overall mobile market. However, non-phone mobile Internet devices, like the forthcoming iPad, are beginning to be an increasingly important part of the mobile landscape.
According to AdMob’s data, smartphone traffic grew 193 percent over the last 12 months, accounting for half the traffic on its network. Feature phones—what most of us think of as a “regular cell phone”—increased traffic 31 percent in the same time frame, but dropped down from 58 to 35 percent of traffic overall. Traffic from mobile Internet devices, including handheld game consoles, e-readers, and other similar Internet-capable devices, grew a whopping 403 percent, and now accounts for 17 percent of the traffic overall.
For further corroboration, data from our own visitor logs for the last month shows that the iPhone OS accounts for two-thirds of our mobile traffic. Android users are hitting up Ars a little over a quarter of the time, while BlackBerry users are visiting every so often. WinMo, webOS, Symbian, and others are barely a blip on the radar.
The iPad represents yet another opportunity for Apple to grow the iPhone OS platform in the MID category, and early hype suggests that opportunity is a large one. Some manufacturers are adapting Android for tablet-like devices, and it already powers the Nook e-reader. WinMo and RIM won’t likely have similar platform expansion anytime soon, and given Palm’s dire situation, webOS won’t likely see that as an option either. Nokia seems to be positioning MeeGo for MIDs and Symbian for phones, so it’s difficult to predict how that strategy will play out.
Source: Ars Technica
Popularity: 17%
Be The First To Comment
Related Post
Please Leave Your Comments Below