How does In-Stat predict mobile open source domination

(This picture originally appeared last August at our wonderful Apple blog.)

That's the prediction of a $2,495 report released by In-Stat last Tuesday about the mobile market, which focuses on the opportunities of "app stores" living on the phones rather than online.

Principal analyst David Chamberlain is the company's director of consumer electronics research, with extensive contacts in China, but as our Dawn Kawamoto notes, using AdMob statistics, an open source win here would be a big market upset.

Mobile handsets currently represent a third of all Internet traffic, up from 26 percent just six months ago, so by the time this prediction is tested the mobile Internet can be expected to be the dominant form of online communication.

That's what makes the search for a Twitter business model such a parlor game, as Twitter represents the first real bridge between today's desktop Web and tomorrow's mobile Web.

The In-Stat prediction is even more remarkable when you consider that the iPhone currently has about half the U.S. mobile Internet market, against 5% for the Android. Google phones are really going to go from a 10-1 disadvantage to a market lead?

The only possible way to conclude that is to believe both carriers and manufacturers are going to concentrate on the Android platform, leaving them little bandwidth for the Blackberry, Windows Mobile, LiMo, or anything else.

That certainly seems to be what I'm hearing from developers at the present time, but the question is how long they will wait for big revenue in a world where three months is a very long time.

I am personally a big booster of open source, but I can't find any respectable Android kit at my local store. Have you seen anything?