Mobile Awesomeness Blog

Here are some highlights from the most recent AdMob metrics report, released a couple of weeks ago:

• This month's summary is short and sweet: the iPhone OS (includes iPod Touch) continues to dominate the AdMob network as far as market share goes. It accounts for 65% of all HTML site requests, and 43% of mobile website requests. Android is creeping in at 9% (HTML) and 3% (mobile) respectively, and Symbian represents 7% (HTML) and 36% (mobile). Optimize for these devices first, and you are likely covering the majority.
• RIM's market share continues to decline each month. The manufacturer now only has a 3% worldwide market share, 5.6% in the US and only has 2 phones in the top 20.

The following stats are based on 7,535,272,901 requests:

Top 5 Countries

1. United States (47%, -0.5%)
2. Indonesia (10.8%, +1.6%)
3. India (5.9%, -1.7%)
4. Philippines (4.0%, +0.1%)
5. United Kingdom (3.4%, +0.5%)

Top 5 Worldwide Handsets

1. Apple iPhone (15.1%, +1.9%)
2. Apple iPod Touch (11%, +2.2%)
3. Samsung R450 (2.4%, +0.5%)
4. Motorola RAZR V3 (2.3%, -0.4%)
5. Nokia N70 (2.0%, -0.1%)

Top 5 US Handsets

1. Apple iPhone (20.0%, +3.0%)
2. Apple iPod Touch (14.8%, +2.6%)
3. Samsung R450 (5.2%, +1%)
4. Motorola RAZR V3 (4.4%, -0.7%)
5. Motorola Z6M (2.7%, -0.3)

Download the full report here: http://www.admob.com/s/solutions/metrics

Mobify is another fantastic platform available to website creators that does most of the heavy lifting if you want a quality mobile experience for your users. Thanks to mobile platforms like this one (others listed here), gone are the days when you have to hire a mobile expert or web developer to have a mobile site that works across various platforms.

What differentiates it from platforms like MoFuse (reviewed last week) is flexibility with regards to the design and layout. Although Mobify is hosted, it gives you complete control over the mobile stylesheets. Combine the style control with an extremely helpful interface that makes it painfully simple to select what elements you want as part of the mobile site, and you can see why major websites are taking notice and using this platform. Among them are A List Apart, McDonald's and Spin Magazine, among others.

Like most other players in this space, they have a basic free account, and I believe monthly pricing as well. I would expand on the pricing, but it was surprisingly nowhere available on the website. For an introduction to the platform, check out this video:

View more screencasts here.

MoFuse is a mobile platform that pretty much anyone can use to create a mobile version of their website. Actually, it took about 15 minutes to create one for our site until we have the opportunity to do it up right. They have a really nice dashboard where you can setup design details, add pages, view analytics and more. Blogs with up to 2 feeds/pages are free, and their premium subscription ranges from $39/month to $199/month.

If you want unlimited control and customizations for your mobile site, this is not the platform for you. However, if you want something simple, easy to create and instantly compatible with 4,500+ devices, MoFuse is for you. For more, check out the tour, or create a free site here.

Here are some highlights from the most recent AdMob metrics report, released a couple of weeks ago:

• The story in March is Android. The HTC Dream (aka G1), while still the 10th most popular device (4th in smartphones), is showing impressive growth of 47% on average between November '08 and March '09. With more Android handsets on schedule for release in 2009, it could be a huge year for Google's infant OS.
• With an increase of 17% over February, requests continue stellar growth. However, a higher percentage than ever are coming from mobile applications, rather than websites.
• Requests from the US increased nearly 4%, while all other top countries decreased or had minimal gains in March.
• Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch continue stellar growth in the worldwide handset market, each increasing market share 2.1%, while all other handsets had minimal gains/losses +/- 1%.
• Samsung took over the #2 spot in the US for most requests at 17.6%, formerly held by Motorola, who saw a decrease of 1.6% to 16.8%.

The following stats are based on 7,654,044,490 requests:

Top 5 Countries

1. United States (47.5%, +3.9%)
2. Indonesia (9.2%, -5.1%)
3. India (7.6%, +0.2%)
4. Philippines (3.9%, 0%)
5. United Kingdom (2.9%, 0%)

Top 5 Worldwide Handsets

1. Apple iPhone (13.3%, +2.1%)
2. Apple iPod Touch (8.8%, +2.1%)
3. Motorola RAZR V3 (2.7%, -0.2%)
4. Nokia N70 (2.1%, -0.3%)
5. Samsung R450 (2.0%, +0.7%)

Top 5 US Handsets

1. Apple iPhone (17.0%, +0.6%)
2. Apple iPod Touch (12.1%, +1.5%)
3. Motorola RAZR V3 (5.0%, -0.8%)
4. Samsung R450 (4.2%, 1.2%)
5. Blackberry 8300 (Curve) (3.3%, +0.2%)

Download the full report here: http://www.admob.com/s/solutions/metrics

Here are some highlights from the most recent AdMob metrics report, released a couple of weeks ago:

• February is a short month, but we were still a little surprised that wordwide requests actually went down for the first time since we had started following these reports, to 6.6 billion
• Smartphone operating systems were featured this month, and the only two that have actually increased market share over the last six months is the iPhone and Android. The iPhone has a 40% US share, and 29% worldwide share, while Android is up to 5% in the US after only three months.
• The Blackberry Curve and Pearl are still RIM's mainstay handsets, accounting for 77.4% of their market share.
• Worldwide, the Symbian OS (Nokia) still accounts for 43% of worldwide traffic, the iPhone is up to 33% and RIM comes in at 10%.
• The Philippines made a huge jump in requests, hurdling the UK to become 4th largest in the world.

The following stats are based on 6,555,217,223 requests:

Top 5 Countries

1. United States (43.6%, +0.2%)
2. Indonesia (14.4%, -1.9%)
3. India (7.5%, +0.8%)
4. Philippines (3.9%, +1.1%)
5. United Kingdom (2.8%, -0.9%)

Top 5 Worldwide Handsets

1. Apple iPhone (11.2%, +0.2%)
2. Apple iPod Touch (6.7%, -0.7%)
3. Motorola RAZR V3 (2.9%, -0.1%)
4. Nokia N70 (2.4%, -0.1%)
5. Nokia 3110c (1.6%, +0.2%)

Top 5 US Handsets

1. Apple iPhone (16.4%, -0.4%)
2. Apple iPod Touch (10.6%, -1.7%)
3. Motorola RAZR V3 (5.9%, 0%)
4. Motorola Z6m (3.5%, 0%)
5. Blackberry 8300 (Curve) (3.0%, +0.2%)

Download the full report here: http://www.admob.com/s/solutions/metrics

Fennec, otherwise known as "mobile Firefox", is on the way! Recently Mozilla released an early developer alpha (testing only for now) of the browser, and it's great to welcome a quality, open source mobile browser to the scene!

Currently you can install Fennec on your local Mac, PC or Linux box, and it also runs on Nokia N810 devices. I installed the Mac version on my own, and it's pretty rough. But they told me it would be, and this should evolve into a really nice, standards-compliant mobile web browser in the future. Keep an eye out for it!

There's a new mobile javascript framework on the block, which will join popular frameworks like iui. It is called jQTouch, and as you might imagine, it's a jQuery plug-in just for mobile WebKit browsers, like the one on the iPhone and iPod Touch. Visit the website and you can signup for email updates as the framework grows.

PhoneGap is an ambitious open source project that strives to help developers build platform-independent mobile applications using HTML and Javascript. For any web developer, this is music to our ears! And the beautiful thing is ... it works. This framework is a game-changer in the iPhone and mobile web development space.

Writing anything further simply would not do this project justice, so watch this video and learn about it in their words:

Recently we were sent a new mobile resource that has a really interesting business model, and could be a huge benefit to developers not wanting to spend days optimizing for all the various mobile handsets.

The site is called Mobile Elements. Basically you create a website using standard XHTML, then call their various APIs, which will optimize your code for mobile handsets based on their extensive device database of literally thousands of phones.

The service also gives you the ability to override any of the device profiles in order to make your site display perfectly. Although a little pricey for most websites right now, we think it's a wicked cool idea. 

Mobile stylesheets and mobile browser detection is all well and good. We can all agree it is easier to implement, and it's better than nothing. But in 2009 it is simply not enough if you want a high success rate with users.

What's the problem? Well, there are 2:

1. Mobile phone networks (for the most part) are not fast enough. Although you can make a site look great with a mobile stylesheet, it still takes seemingly forever to download the full page content as if it were being displayed in a computer browser.

2. Not everyone has an unlimited data plan. Don't force them to download 250kb of data when all they need to see is 25kb of it. Many mobile users still pay by the kilobyte or megabyte.

In Jacob Nielsen's recent article about mobile web usability in 2009, he makes the case for having a separate mobile website all together. He lists the reasons above, along with some other compelling information collected from their usability tests.

If you are about to take on a mobile website project, you should seriously consider the benefits of building a 100% separate version. Your audience will thank you!