iPhone Beats Windows Mobile In Browsing Use

via InformationWeek

Market statistician Net Applications says on its Web site that Apple iPhones currently account for .09 percent of Web browsing, while all Windows Mobile devices put together accout for only .06 percent. That's pretty astonishing, given the relative numbers of handheld devices running each OS in the marketplace.

Those numbers are truly low. Given the total volume of Web page retrievals the difference between nine one-hundredths of 1 percent and six one-hundredths of a percent stats is a gnat's eyelash. But Net Applications finds them persuasive, and they confirm a conclusion I came to last summer when I wrote a piece on browsing the Web on a smartphone: it works a lot better on an iPhone than it does on a Windows Mobile handheld.

Another report published last week by Daniel Dilger in his "Roughly Drafted" blog claims that iPhone is also outselling all Windows Mobile devices combined in the U.S. market (but, to be sure, still trailsRIM (NSDQ: RIMM)'s BlackBerry).

Dilger cites statistics from analyst firm Canalys that I can't find on the Web, and his blog is a little too consistently kind to Apple, but his piece does make interesting reading. And his stats are supported by analyst firm NPD, which recently calculated that the iPhone held 27 percent of the smartphone market in the U.S. (and the smartphone market has almost tripled over the past year to hold 11 percent of all mobile phone sales, which is also astonishing growth.)

If all these statistics are reliable, it just could be that Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) is losing out in the growth market for mobile operating systems. Whatever the numbers, Microsoft isn't about to be put out of business. Net Applications says 78.3 percent of all Web browsing in the U.S. is done from devices running Windows XP, while Apple OSes, whether Intel-based, Power PC or iPhone, account for just 6.9. But the mobile market certainly doesn't seem to be going Microsoft's way – and Google's Android looks like it will only make the fight tougher.