iPhones logged around the world

Stephen Withers
Monday, 04 February 2008 05:30

Your IT - Mobility

It might be difficult to find out how many iPhones are being connected to carriers other than Apple's partners, but statistics are available for web use.

Net Applications' Market Share report reveals that "The iPhone has a presence in almost every country on earth."

The analysis shows the 'market share' of the iPhone's Safari browser in different countries. As you'd expect, it is small - less than 0.1 percent for most nations.

The device is most established in the US in terms of official sales, and this is reflected in a 0.2 percent share in Net Applications' stats.

Yet the US only comes in at number five on the list.

Trinidad & Tobago and the Maldives are ranked three and four respectively (with 0.25 and 0.24 percent shares), and it's tempting to suggest this could reflect upmarket tourists taking their iPhones on holiday.

In second place (0.47 percent) comes Cote D'Ivoire, formerly known to Anglophones as Ivory Coast. Despite its attractions, political instability means it is not a prime tourist area, so my tourist theory wouldn't seem to apply there. The historical links with France and the open availability of officially-unlocked iPhones in that country might be an explanation, but that seems a bit of a stretch.

But what are we to make of Equatorial Guinea taking top spot with an amazing 2.21 percent share? Its status as Africa's third-largest producer of oil means some people have money, and the presence of well-paid expatriate oil workers could have an impact. Unless the general level of Internet use is particularly low in Equatorial Guinea, it's hard to see why  the iPhone has had such a big impact on the statistics.

As for the other countries where iPhones are officially sold, the handset takes a 0.08 percent share of web use in France and the UK, and 0.06 percent in Germany.

Net Applications reports a 0.01 percent web share for the iPhone in China, 0.02 percent for Australia and India, 0.03 percent for Canada, and 0.05 percent for Hong Kong.