Research in Motion's BlackBerry OS has overtaken Apple's iOS (iPod Touch, iPhone, and iPad) for the first time in terms of mobile Internet usage. The latest US November data comes from Web analytics company StatCounter and its research arm, StatCounter Global Stats.
The BlackBerry OS managed to grab 34.3 percent last month while Apple's iOS recorded 33 percent. Google's Android is rapidly gaining and has almost tripled its Internet market share from 8.2 percent in November 2009 to 23.8 in November 2010. Apple's iOS has fallen from 51.9 percent to 33 percent over the same period. Microsoft's new Windows Phone 7 has not yet registered a significant amount of Internet usage.
"These figures suggest that developers should not be developing solely for the iPhone to the exclusion of BlackBerry and Android," Aodhan Cullen, CEO of StatCounter, said in a statement. "This data demonstrates that there is a battle royal already going on in the smartphone market for the consumer and business internet user. You can never underestimate Microsoft but it looks to have its work cut out."
He also added that if current trends continue, BlackBerry and Android combined are on course to become twice the size of iOS in mobile Internet usage next year. The statistics are based on aggregate data collected by StatCounter on a sample exceeding 15 billion page views per month collected from across the StatCounter network of more than three million websites.