Touch Leads the Way in Mobile Internet Device Growth

Mobile advertising network AdMob has released its Mobile Metrics Report for February. The report examines the growth rate of Smartphones, feature phones, and mobile Internet devices over the past year.
In February 2010, Smartphones accounted for 48% of AdMobs worldwide traffic, up from 35% in February 2009. The strong growth of iPhone and Android traffic, fuelled by heavy application usage, was primarily responsible for the increase, AdMob says.
Although the share of feature phone traffic in AdMobs network declined from 58% to 35% year-on-year, absolute traffic from feature phones still grew 31%. Mobile Internet devices experienced the strongest growth of the three categories, increasing to account for 17% of traffic in AdMobs network in February 2010. The iPod touch is the top mobile Internet device and is responsible for vast majority of this traffic. Other devices include the Sony PSP and Nintendo DSi.
Highlights from the February 2010 AdMob Mobile Metrics Report include:

  • iPhone OS increased its share of Smartphone requests from 33% in February 2009 to 50% in February 2010.
  • Symbian's share of Smartphone requests fell from 43% in February 2009 to 18% in February 2010.
  • Android increased its share from 2% in February 2009 to 24% in February 2010. 
  • The top five Android devices worldwide, by traffic, were the Motorola Droid, HTC Dream, HTC Hero, HTC Magic, and the Motorola CLIQ. The Google Nexus One generated just 1% of total Android traffic in February 2010.
  • Samsung, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, and LG were the top manufacturers of feature phones. Top feature phones from each manufacturer in AdMobs network were the Samsung SCH R350, Nokia 3110c, Sony Ericsson W200i, Motorola RAZR V3, and LG CU920.             

For the purpose of categorisation, AdMob considers a Smartphone to run an identifiable Operating System, a feature phone to be mobile phone that does not fit into the Smartphone category, and a mobile Internet device to be a handheld device that connects to the mobile Internet but is not a phone. AdMob has changed the format of the country pages in the February 2010 Report to include the top 10 Smartphones and additional trended data.
You can access the full report, as well as archived reports from previous months, here.