The Government has offered Australia's three mobile operators, and vividwireless, renewal of their existing spectrum allocated on 15 year licences in the late 90s and early 2000s at set prices, while the Government expects to rake in $3 billion.
The iPhone (and probably the iPod touch, though it's not clear whether Net Applications includes that model) is definitely on the map with a 0.32 percent share in September. For the second month running, the iPhone's web share has been bigger than all the other minor platforms put together. iPhone web usage seems sure to increase as the device goes on sale in more and more countries.
The rest has been spread thinly between the PlayStation (currently 0.03 percent), Wii (0.01 percent) and 'others' (0.21 percent, down from 0.31 percent in the year-ago period but still much higher than the 0.07 percent recorded in October 2006).
Browser share figures make interesting reading, even though it is still a three-horse race if you ignore anything with less than a 1 percent share.
At 71.52 percent, Internet Explorer still has more than three and and half times the share of its closest rival, but it's losing ground fairly steadily.
Firefox has improved its share by almost one-third since September 2007, improving from 14.99 percent to 19.46 percent.
Safari use is also on the up and up, but it has grown slightly less than the Mac's web share, suggesting that there's some leakage to Firefox and other browsers, or that people who have tried the Windows version are turning away from it.
Net Applications' stats also show that Chrome peaked at over one percent when first launched, but the final figure for the month was 0.78 percent. More than Opera, more than Netscape, more than any other browser outside the big three.
Just watch that figure shoot up once Google offers a version of Chrome that matches the traditional idea of a beta release (feature-complete and no known bugs). Oh, and Mac and Linux versions wouldn't hurt, either, even if they only account for less than 10 percent of web use on Net Applications' figures.
So, at this rate, a 10 percent Mac OS X web share isn't too far away, still massively outgunning Linux and providing an ever growing alternative to Windows. For Apple, it's great news and a vindication of Steve Jobs and his plans over the past few years – and in all likelihood the best is yet to come!
David Bass
| ComOps, a leading Australian provider of business software products and services, has won a competitive tender to deploy its Salvus safety, r…
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