Symbian Blog

The guys at AdMob produced a new set of their mobile metrics data for April, the full report can be found here. This data has been reported at Ars and elsewhere, mostly covering iPhone growth.  By Admob’s own admission this data can be skewed in various ways* since it is based on the ads they serve but its still a great data set that throws up some interesting things.  Here’s a couple that stick out for me

1. Some emerging markets have truly emerged

Indonesia, India and the Philippines together account for over 20% of mobile hits and are the 2^nd, 3^rd and 4^th biggest consumers of mobile data respectively. These countries have been consistently high in Admob’s reports and demonstrate a long held assertion that mobile data can take hold in countries where fixed broadband penetration takes longer to achieve.

All three of these markets also share that Symbian OS is the dominant smartphone platform for consumption of mobile data.  In these markets Symbian OS counts for around 95% of smartphone mobile data usage.

2. Wifi vs 3G

Talking about Wifi vs 3G feels very early noughties, however in markets where broadband and wireless are becoming ubiquitous the argument arises again.  A recent article in Wired pronounced “the end of the cell” based on widespread easy access wifi in the US.

So, what’s this got to do with this data? Well, the iPhone has been talked about a lot, but here it gives us an opportunity to use it in a different way. We can gain some insight into data use between Wifi and cellular since it breaks out the iPod touch and the iPhone.  At Apple’s recent SDK launch they claimed that they had sold 17 million iPhones and 30 million iPod touch/iPhones in total. If you combine that info with the Admob data (i.e 15% and 11% of worldwide mobile data respectively) then it seems that, on average, an iPhone user consumes only 5% more data than an iPod touch user.

What does this mean? Maybe nothing, but rather than declare the end of the cell, I think it tells us what we all know, that convergence is here.  Instead of talking about this as the Smartphone market, the Netbook market, (even the smartbook market, thanks Qualcomm) its really just one big converged device market with a selection of connectivity technologies.  The story used to be that the phone gobbled up other markets; PMP, Camera, GPS. But now I think we will look at this as a spectrum of devices from Phone to MID to Netbook to Nintendo DS to Kindle to whatever.  It also means that a conversation I used to hear that went “product X isn’t competition because it’s not a phone” doesn’t happen any more.

Further, this analysis of mobile data occurring significantly over Wifi combined with the fact that there are now genuine integrated VoIP solutions on mobile devices also tells the network operators that they really shouldn’t be relying on that slice of 3G spectrum to keep their customers. But then I think most of them know that already, don’t they?

* Sorry, I can’t resist a few notes about why I think it’s a little unfair to Symbian

1. Admob have dedicated solutions for people to embed ads in iPhone and Android applications, this will cause some selection bias in the numbers

2. I suspect that English language ads are the majority and therefore some regions where Symbian is strong e.g. Japan, China probably don’t register as strongly as they should

3. Although I suspect this doesn’t cause a huge skew in the data, there are different browsers for Symbian.  Whilst the majority will be the S60 webkit based browser, (which has had inconsistent UAProf strings across devices) most of the Japan devices use Access.  Also, bear in mind that people can use other browsers such as Opera etc.

4. This is just number 2 again , but really, where is China in these numbers? A recent study by Netpop reports that there are over 5.5x more mobile web users in China than the US!

BTW it is not my intention to criticize Admob here, these are great stats and I hope they continue to produce them.