Internet traffic data shows the iPhone was top dog in February

In a post last week I talked about how RIM is still doing quite well in the US market and has the potential to gain marketshare for several reasons (multiple carrier support, out-of-the box syncing/email experience, and multiple form factors). I was wrong in my original title by stating that RIM has nearly twice the Apple US market since the data was for worldwide share and updated my title and part of my post thanks to information from readers. AdMob released their February 2009 report (PDF link) that gathers data from ads on more than 6,000 mobile web sites and 1,000 applications around the world. This data does not show sales information, which is tough to really understand because of the way companies count sales and the way data analysis companies count smartphones.

I like that AdMob considers a smartphone to be a phone that runs Symbian, RIM, Palm, iPhone, Windows Mobile, Linux, Hiptop, or Android operating systems and think that is about as accurate as you can get. Granted, the Symbian OS may be debatable because Nokia has some pretty basic phones that run the Series 40 and S60 operating systems.

Looking at the US smartphone figures, Apple has the lions share of traffic 50% in Febuary 2009 with RIM in second with 21%, Windows Mobile in third with 13%, Palm in fourth with 7% and Android in fifth with 5%. That actually isn't bad for Android considering there is a single device on the smallest of the four major wireless carriers with a very limited 3G data network.

The amazing trend to me is the vast difference looking back just six months ago when the iPhone was at only 10%, RIM was at 32%, Windows Mobile was at 30%, Palm was at 19%, and Android was not even present. The iPhone and Android were the only two of the five that saw an increase in traffic over the last six months.

The BlackBerry Storm was the top smartphone to access the Internet on the Verizon Wireless network with 38% of the traffic. Imagine if the huge Verizon network also had the iPhone device.

As a Nokia user, it was interesting to see the the top devices were quite old (the Nokia N70, N80, N73, and N95). The Blackjack II led the Windows Mobile traffic with the HTC Touch closely behind. IMHO the Blackjack II is one of the best Windows Mobile devices with one of the best front facing QWERTY keyboards available today.

There is a lot of data in the report and if you are interested in following smartphone trends you may want to check out the report and previous reports that can be found on their Mobile Metrics page.