One out of four smartphones sold is an iPhone or Android-powered device: report

iPhone and Android devices are dominating the smartphone market in 2010. One out of every four smartphones sold worldwide is either an iPhone or Android device.

While Android is increasingly becoming the operating system of choice for the technology-minded smartphone user, the latest AdMob report released on May 26 shows the ratio of iPhone to Android unique devices around the world was around 3.5 to one in April 2010. Add iPad and iPod touch figures to that and you have around 40.8 million Apple unique devices compared to around 11.6 million Android devices across the globe.

According to AdMob's figures Android has an increased market share within the United States (approximately 75 percent of all Android devices are sold there) where device availability and awareness for the Android platform is much higher. In April there were 10.7 million iPhone devices and 8.7 million Android devices in the US.

iPhone OS devices were more evenly spread across the globe. 49% were located in North America, 28% in Western Europe, 9% in the United Kingdom, 6% in France and 2% in Germany.

Android devices were most-widely seen in North America in April 2010 (75%), followed by 12% in Asia, 3% in the UK, and 2% in both France and Germany.

In March 2009 industry watcher Informa Telecoms & Media predicted that the sale of Android-powered devices would overtake iPhone sales by 2012. On May 10 market researcher NPD reported that Android OS sales had overtaken iPhone OS sales to become the second biggest smartphone operating system in the US. According to the report Android OS made up 28 percent of the market behind Research In Motion (RIM) with 36 percent. Apple made up 21 percent of the smartphone market.

AdMob's Mobile Metrics Reports are based on mobile web and application usage from their network of more than 23,000 mobile websites and applications. Their figures are calculated by the "percentage of requests received from a particular handset" and do not represent actual handset sales figures.

The full AdMob report can be downloaded for free here (pdf): http://metrics.admob.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/AdMob-Mobile-Metrics-Apr-10.pdf

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