iPhone and Android rule the roost

If you care about mobile phone market share and the smartphone operating system ‘war’, then you might find AdMob’s latest Mobile Metrics Report for February 2010 mildly interesting and insightful.

Their full PDF report download covers all the fine details, but we’ll summarise the basics; the iPhone OS now accounts for 50% of smartphone operating systems worldwide (at least based on the sites that AdMob actually targets), with Android gaining on it with a 24% share. Unfortunately for Symbian, its share of the smartphone OS market dropped from 43% last year to just 18% this year.

Within the US, Android browsers now account for 42% of the market, just a tiny bit behind the iPhone, with all other browsers fading into insignificance.

It’s a little bit different on the overall hardware front though – Samsung are clear winners with 32% of the market, Nokia a little behind with 24%, whilst the likes of HTC only manage a footnote under the general banner of ‘others’. Of course, this covers all phones with internet access, not just ‘smart’ ones.

Do take the report with a pinch of salt, as it’s all based on traffic generated on AdMob’s network, so it’s fairly US centric. Also keep in mind that Google own AdMob, for whatever that’s worth. Still, AdMob’s quite a good sample, as they serve 7 billion adverts a month within the US, and another few billion across the rest of the world.