• by David L. Smith , September 23, 2008

On the advent of the launch of new phones supporting Google's Android, I thought it would be a good time to put a stake in the ground on the current smartphone data.

AdMob, one of the largest mobile ad networks in the U.S. featured smartphone traffic data on a timely basis last week for its August Mobile Metrics report.

Overall, traffic for these devices is growing dramatically and is now at 25.8% of traffic worldwide and 23.7% for the U.S. Asia is the fastest growing area over the last year, let by double digit growth in Indonesia.

Smartphones are, not surprisingly, the fastest growing devices in the mobile space, led in growth by the Apple iPhone, the Samsung Instinct and the Blackberry Curve. Overall, RIM has 31.2% of the traffic and three of the top ten devices.

In fact, when you pick the top five smartphones, adding Blackberry Pearl and Palm Centro to the list above, you have 12.9% of all U.S. mobile traffic. Nokia was #1 in the world with over 60% of worldwide smartphone traffic and over 50% of every region but the U.S., where the company does have a top 20 ranked smartphone.

For the overall mobile market, Motorola leads the U.S. in traffic overall with the RAZR V3 being #1 in the U.S. and the top four phones with traffic in the U.S. -- but the company's entry in smartphones, the Q, is only the number 18 smartphone in U.S. traffic, and actually lost traffic share in August.

While the Apple iPhone is all the rage in the U.S., its impact has not yet been felt in Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe. RIM (Centro and Curve) and Palm (Centro) still represent more traffic in the U.S. than the iPhone, which is in fourth place but growing rapidly, as is the Samsung Instinct in fifth.

AdMob says that since there is no industry standard definition of a smartphone, they include all phones that have an "identifiable operating system."

What does this mean for your advertising efforts? First, that the promise of mobile advertising is about to be achieved with the kind of penetration that U.S. marketers have been waiting for in the smartphone arena. Second, many of the handsets have enough penetration that you can afford to create custom programs and target by handset. AdMob, PointRoll, Millennial Media and others now offer this type of targeting and custom units.

For the full report, go to www.admob.com/metrics