iPhone Browser Share Beats Windows Mobile

The iPhone's only been on sale for about five months, yet it's already the most popular mobile browser for surfing the Web, beating out even Windows Mobile, according to a recent report.

According to Computerworld, the quarterly browser market share report from Net Applications shows the iPhone with a 0.09 percent share of the overall Web browser market. Sounds puny, right? But consider this: Windows CE (a.k.a. Windows Mobile) managed only 0.06 percent, while Symbian Series 60 (which powers all those cool Nokia phones) eked out a mere 0.01 percent.

Here's a few more numbers to put the news in perspective. Windows Mobile phones have been on sale for about a decade, versus barely half a year for the iPhone; meanwhile, an estimated 20 million Windows Mobile handsets are in circulation (according to TechCrunch), compared to only about 1.4 million iPhones as of late October (according to Apple's fourth-quarter numbers).

So how did the iPhone get such a big browser share so quickly? Easy: it's got a great browser, and people are using it. I've yet to find a mobile Web browser that does such a good job at rendering full HTML pages, and browsing is surprisingly speedy over the iPhone's pokey EDGE connection (provided you've got a decent signal). While the mobile Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile phones is better than a bare-bones WAP browser, there's just too much scrolling and stylus-tapping involved, and pages take too long to render, even on 3G handsets.

Related:
iPhone browsing marketshare closes in on 0.1% [Computerworld]