A reader asked over at the report of Microsoft's Quarterly Report what number of phones worldwide use the various mobile operating systems. Well as fate may have it, the answer fell in out laps this morning.

Electronista.com is reporting on an AdMob March 2009 report that shows how each OS stacks up worldwide and in the United States.

According to the report, in the U.S. Apple has approximately 50 percent of traffic where RIM gets 22 percent. Windows Mobile has 11 percent in its home arena, and both Android and Palm lay claim to 6 percent. Hiptop represents 4 percent while Symbian earns just a single percentage point. Worldwide, Apple drops to 38 percent, RIM is at 11 percent, Symbian 37 percent, Palm and Android are at 3 percent, Hiptop at 2 percent and Windows Mobile comes in with 6 percent.

The one caveat on these reports, they are based on AdMob's advertising requests and not necessarily sales figures. AdMob is a mobile advertising marketplace, offering solutions for discovery, branding and monetization on the mobile web. So while this bodes well for Apple in the U.S., the report is based on ad sales as opposed to unit sales.

I am sure that the sales figures will be slightly different.  Microsoft reportedly selling 20 million units worldwide in 2008 and Apple claims 37 million units sold.  The one problem with Apples sales figures is that it combines the iPhone and iTouch; a trend that is becoming more popular with Apple.  I wonder if Microsoft includes PDA's that run Windows Mobile in their stats?

Everyone is raving about the sales the iPhone is making and it deserves its props, but its still not putting up Windows Mobile numbers. In fact, during the third quarter of 08 apple only shipped about 4.4 mill iPhones while Windwos Mobile put out a healthy 5 mil.  Now, part of the the drop in the iPhone sales is that they may have finally reached all the markets they hadn't yet with the iPhone 3G, so they may be coming close to some kind of geographic saturation. 

Tam Hanna has taken the time to go over Handango's "Yardstick 2007" report (not my favorite company, but that's a different rant) which shows how the industry is changing in terms of platforms (PalmOS, WM Standard, WM Pro, Sybmian, BB) and category of applications e.g. games, productivity, etc.

With the added touch of some simple Excel graphs, Tam finds some very interesting results. For instance, in the number of new applications added for WM Professional, it actually dipped in 2007 compared to 2006--which is quite the surprise. However, WM Standard actually increased, suggesting non-touchscreen devices, which have become more prevalent and cheaper, are quickly growing and balancing out Standard's big bro's position.

Some other interesting findings:

• PPC-6700 & 700wx are the top PPC devices adding software
• Moto Q and Sammy BJ are the top Standard ones
• Average application price has dropped in 2007
• SPB has 7 out of 10 of the best selling PPC apps

But probably the biggest shock is how Windows Mobile (while increasing for Standard by a bit and decreasing for Professional) is being eclipsed by Symbian and BlackBerry who are rapidly growing. Yikes. Go over and take a look at all the perty numbers and graphs and drop a comment below on your thoughts.

Personally, I think the explosive growth of the WM freeware and home-coder community has taking some market from the professional developer community, things like PointUI, WeatherPanel, multiple free IM clients and all the happenings at XDA has resulted in what looks to me as an explosion in high quality free apps. Agree?