WebOS Gaining Traffic in Mobile Web
Even though the first webOS device from Palm was released less than four months ago, traffic on the mobile web with the Pre is raising. AdMob has released the Mobile Metrics report with August data. Which is a reflection of the data flowing through their network each month.
The statistics represent the mobile usage AdMob sees from the sites and apps in their network. This means that devices with heavy mobile usage – like the iPhone – have higher share than other devices. For this month, they have published the top devices and smartphones for each region as well as share of usage. On the chart above you can see how the share of operating systems has changed in the last six months. As you can see webOS is giving a good fight.
AdMob’s worldwide and regional statistics are influenced by the location of the traffic in their network, so keep that in mind as you interpret the data. And as you can see on the image below, the Palm Pre is also showing up in the North American Top Handsets as number 5, and in the Top Smartphones ranking 3th.
Reading the Tea Leaves for webOS Updates
That shaker of salt you keep by your desk? Grab it and extract a grain or two, because it's rumor time.
Consider this: We know that the Pre is due out on Bell in Canada on August 27th. Palm isn't likely to want to keep 2 separate ROMs for the device and the Sprint version we currently know and love probably needs some tweaking to 'just work' with Bell's settings. So we might see a minor update to our Pre phones come the 27th, when Canadians finally can get their Pre on. That's the speculation we've heard from a couple of sources, but we haven't been able to confirm anything yet.
From what we've seen, nothing looks too new on the Bell version of the Pre - unless you count the crazy landscape mode for Google Maps that we're still chalking up to an overzealous ad producer. One thing we will note that's "new" is that the Amazon MP3 Store is missing in action on the Canadian Pre, much like the full version of the Amazon's MP3 Store for Canada is missing in action. We're chalking that one up to Amazon's dirty, empty promises.
One thing we're not expecting on the 27th is webOS 1.2. However, a little birdie has whispered what we'd already suspected: webOS 1.2 is out there in test-land, getting put through its paces. We don't know what the features are - but we do know that there are plenty we're hoping for.
