Massive December Means Charts!

Do you heart charts? Really? I heart charts too! Like most data-driven people, few things bring me such an overwhelming sense of data mastery than gazing upon a well-designed infographic, gleaning the secrets that lie within its bars and pies. It’s ambitiously lazy learning at its finest!

The mobile industry had a record breaking December in many respects; below you’ll see some sweet charts from a few of my favorite metric-makers.

First up, AdMob.

Though recently assimilated purchased by everyone’s favorite internet giant, it appears that the good people at AdMob are still hard at work. Side note, if I ever get bought out by Google, I will most likely spend my first post-buyout Christmas and New Year’s Eve here, not in the office doing whatever it was that brought Google to buy me out in the first place. Live a little, people! I digress – back to the charts…

The chart below tells us that data usage for iPod Touches increased 96% on December 26th over the average from the week prior, while iPhone data usage only increased 12% over the same period of time:

The next two charts show operation system version distribution for both the iPhone and the iPod Touch devices; iPod Touch users trail iPhone users in terms of running the most current version of iPhone OS… no surprises here:

Next, Google.

The Android Developers Blog has recently launch what they are calling the device dashboard, showing the relative distribution of Android platform versions based on devices running Android Market:

Last but not least, Flurry.

Feeling charted-out yet? Well hold on, there are only two more and they are worth it! The information below comes from my personal favorite of all the mobile infographers; Flurry stated that:

Out of the estimated 58 million iPhone and iPod Touch devices in the market at the time, Flurry estimated roughly 40% of those, or 24 million, were iPod Touch devices. It appears that an influx of new iPod Touch devices has flooded the market over Christmas, and that users of the handset, primarily pre-teen and teen audiences, are voracious downloaders.

Please note that the chart below artificially sets iPhone download volume at “1″ for the iPhone on Christmas day to allow relative comparisons:

This next chart goes out to my DROID-toting friend, Tim. Downloads from the App Store are still crushing the numbers posted by the Android Market; bringing up this point, however, will only incite a reminder from Tim that we still need to bring our photography app, Best Camera (iTunes link), to the Android platform.

I’ll bring this post to a close with three nuggets of goodness from entrepreneur Mark Signal:

Three takeaways on this one. One, the iPod Touch is such a game changer in that it allows Apple to segment the market between subsidized, carrier-oriented offerings and non-subsidized, direct to consumer ones, a strategy that they would be wise to repeat across bag-able (Tablet) and Home Theater (Apple TV) device segments.

Two, as a platform play, it amazes me how few grok the combined footprint of iPhone/iPod Touch and what it means to consumer and developer pull (not to mention Apple’s massive billing relationship). People get so caught up in the phone/non phone distinction that they treat the numbers as somehow a 1+1=<2 story. Dumb.

Three, the Android device % split is emblematic of the challenges that Google will face in trying to avoid their platform from fragmenting, a challenge that they have only accelerated by announcing their own branded phone, something that I blogged about in: Android, Inevitability and the Dawn of Mobile

There, that ought to be enough to get your brain thinking in “mobile” mode, and just in time for 2010 no less.

Happy New Year!

– RP