Stats: iPhone OS is still king of the mobile web space, but Android is nipping at its heels

AdMob serves north of 10 billion ads per month to more than 15,000 mobile websites and applications. Thus, although its data is about ad rather than page impressions, it can be taken as a pretty robust indicator of how web usage habits are developing and changing over time. Android is the big standout of its most recent figures, with Google loyalists now constituting a cool 42 percent of AdMob's smartphone audience in the US. With the EVO 4G and Galaxy S rapidly approaching, we wouldn't be surprised by the little green droid stealing away the US share crown, at least until Apple counters with its next slice of magical machinery. Looking at the global stage, Android has also recently skipped ahead of Symbian, with a 24 percent share versus 18 percent for the smartphone leader. Together with BlackBerry OS, Symbian is still the predominant operating system in terms of smartphone sales, but it's interesting to see both falling behind in the field of web or application usage, which is what this metric seeks to measure. Figures from Net Applications (to be found at the TheAppleBlog link) and ArsTechnica's own mobile user numbers corroborate these findings.

Samsung's Galaxy S has four times the polygon power of Snapdragon

When we got some hands-on time with the recently announced Samsung Galaxy S, it was painfully apparent that the thing has some serious power under the hood. Now we have a better idea of just how much power, with reports indicating that it has the graphics oomph (thanks to its PowerVR SGX540 GPU) to push 90 million triangles per second. Compare that to the Snapdragon platform, which manages 22 million polygons, and the iPhone 3GS's 28 million from the earlier SGX535, and you get a feel for the muscle lurking behind that gorgeous Super AMOLED screen. Of course, polygon counts aren't everything when it comes to graphical power these days, and 300 million triangles won't help you if your handset gets laggy after you install every single Bejeweled clone in the Android Market, but forgive us if we're a little excited about the rapidly brewing mobile GPU war.