The mobile advertising firm AdMob has released its Mobile Metrics Report for August 2009. I’m not sure if any of the data in it is that surprising, but it does show some market shifts.
First and most notable are in the big guys. Symbian, according to AdMob’s metrics, is down to 34% global market share, while iPhone is up to 40% That means, at least according to this data, that the iPhone is now the most popular smartphone OS in the world. Somewhere in Cupertino, Steve Jobs is cackling madly.
The issue here is that Symbian (despite its defenders and its prolonged popularity) has not done anything interesting in years. Symbian 7 is more popular than Symbian 8, and Symbian 8 is more popular than Symbian 9, and so on and so forth. In other words, subsequent versions of Symbian have not been met with as much enthusiasm as the older ones. That’s a function of other, more appealing smartphone options, which is why I’m hoping Nokia kills of Symbian and just goes with Maemo.
The other notable is that Android grew from 2% to 7%, which is a huge increase. While it’s not as big as the iPhone’s growth, it is impressive. This is probably due to the large number of handsets running Android which were released this year.
And then everything else is losing market share except for WebOS. For Palm, however, the challenge will be to get WebOS to continue to grow even after the Pre isn’t new anymore and when Sprint customers have other options like the HTC Hero Android phone.
As for the rest? They’re losing out. Palm OS is dead, and that’s according to Palm. Steve Ballmer said that the current Windows Mobile is dross. And RIM hasn’t done anything cool in years. Both of these companies need to come out with something to really wow consumers if they want to make a comeback.
