51Degrees.mobi, the leading provider of device detection and web optimisation solutions, has today published an analysis of the mobile devices its online partners detected browsing the internet last year.

The 51Degrees.mobi Mobile Web Trends 2011 white paper shows that the proportion of mobile web visitors in the USA with Android devices overtook Apple users by the end of the year. The share of Apple iOS web traffic in December 2011 fell to 34.1% in the US, while Android increased to 36.6%.

Every year, TheFonecast.com offers its mobile industry predictions for the following twelve months. In December, I joined Iain Graham and Mark Bridge to offer my forecast for 2012.

More recently, I was invited by GoMo News to share further details about some of those thoughts... including the potential decline of Apple’s mobile market share and the growth of Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system.

Christmas 2011 has seem more people than ever using their mobile phones to shop online. That in itself isn’t surprising - but what’s caught our eyes is the scale of the increase.

IBM Coremetrics has released a series of figures that compare 2011’s key shopping days in the USA with last year’s online traffic. First came ‘Black Friday’, which is the day after Thanksgiving Day. It says mobile devices accounted for 14.3% of all US online retail traffic on 25th November, up from 5.6% in 2010. Over two-thirds of that traffic was via Apple iPhones and iPads. Sales on mobile devices reached 9.8% of all online purchases, up from 3.2% year-on-year.

According to comScore the top Smart Phone OS platform in the US is Google Android.

Top smartphone OS platforms
	Share of smartphone subscribers
	Feb 2011	May 2011	Point change
Total smartphone subscribers	100.0%	100.0%
Google Android	33.0%	38.1%	5.1
Apple iOS	25.2%	26.6%	1.4
RIM (BlackBerry)	28.9%	24.7%	-4.2
Microsoft Windows Phone	7.7%	5.8%	-1.9
Palm webOS	2.8%	2.4%	-0.4

[Tables show three-month average Mar/Apr/May 2011 vs Dec/Jan/Feb 2011. Total US mobile subscribers aged 13+]