If you don’t have a web site designed for mobile phones, you don’t just risk frustrating your customers when they visit you online. You’re also likely to drain their smartphone batteries. That’s the message from a research team based at California’s Stanford University.

The researchers published a paper entitled “Who Killed My Battery: Analyzing Mobile Browser Energy Consumption” at the World Wide Web 2012 conference last week. They used an Android handset to browse a variety of popular web sites, measuring the phone’s energy consumption as it loaded and rendered web pages. As well as analysing each page, the team also measured the energy needed to render individual web elements such as images, JavaScript, and CSS.

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%.

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+]