Netbiscuits has released the latest edition of its free Mobile Web Metrics Report, which provides up-to-date information on the HTML5 capabilities of top devices in the UK, the USA, Germany, Malaysia and Australia.

The report identifies a lack of support for HTML5 among the UK’s top handsets, revealing that out of 18 different HTML5 features tested, not one was fully supported by all top 15 devices in the UK market. “Even those features that are most widely discussed in the mobile industry today, such as Geolocation API, are still only implemented on 50 per cent of the top 15 devices in the UK,” says Netbiscuits UK managing director, Duncan Hallas. “As a consequence, we embrace HTML5 technology, but we do not solely rely on it to implement rich UX features across multiple mobile devices.”

The report also contains data on the market share of relevant smartphone operating systems on a global, regional and per-market basis, and sheds some light on the ratio between dominating versus ‘long tail’ devices on all levels.

In terms of smartphone operating systems the report acknowledges a trend towards a growing number of relevant platforms in the UK market. “Different from other European markets, which are still clearly dominated by Apple iOS, the UK market shows four operating systems that are quite equally distributed among the smartphone segment” says Hallas. “Symbian still has the lead with 28 per cent, followed by RIM (26.5 per cent), Apple iOS (22.5 per cent) and Google Android (20.5 per cent).”

The report also reveals the importance of long tail mobile devices for accessing the web, with more than 71 per cent of all mobile site requests processed by Netbiscuits in the UK coming from long tail devices.

The Mobile Web Metrics Report is based on metrics generated from over 4.5bn mobile pages requests processed by Netbiscuits mobile publishing platform every month. It is available as a free download here.