Smartphones are flying, Nexus One is limping: AdMobs February analytics

This article is sponsored by WINplc: a leading enabler of mobile centric information, entertainment and interaction services.

The time has come for the monthly metrics report from AdMob. As one of the largest mobile advertisers in the world, it places ads on a vast number and variety of mobile phones – and is able to glean a lot of valuable data from that. This months report has little bonus info, though. AdMob has broken down mobile devices into three separate categories: feature phones, smartphones and MIDs (mobile internet devices), and is comparing the performance of all three over the last year.

As you can see, smartphones are steadily kicking ass, while feature phones trails off and MIDs raises slowly. Now, there is one thing to bear in mind: this graph doesn’t show the overall performance of the three kinds of device. It only shows the % of the total market they’ve got as compared to EACH OTHER. The number of feature phones being used to access the internet has actually increased by 31% – it’s just that smartphone and MID use has increased a LOT faster.

Other highlights:

• Smartphone traffic has jumped from 35% to 48% from since February of 2009. This has mostly been due to app use on iPhone and Android.
• MIDs may still be at the bottom but they had the strongest growth, now accounting for almost 1 fifth of all AdMob’s traffic this February. The iPod Touch was leading this charge, and is responsible for the vast majority of MID traffic.
• iPhone OS is still growing – from 33% to 50% over the last year.
• Symbian use is falling off, from 43% to 18% in the same period.
• Android pushed up slightly from 22% to 24%. This didn’t have much to do with the Nexus One at all – it was mostly down to the Droid, which tops the chart for Android traffic. Nexus was at the rear of the pack, with only had around 1% of Android traffic.

What we think?

So smartphones in general are rising rapidly, with iPhone and Android being at the forefront. It’s a shame about the Nexus One, but I guess having crappy customer care and an almost entirely on-line advertising strategy hasn’t paid off.