By Nathan Rudyk

Make an insanely useful smartphone device, and they will come, and they will surf.

As a fairly recent iPhone convert (awaiting some billing shock after a recent U.S. client trip where I could have likely justified a Rogers plan upgrade), I found this Fortune Apple 2.0 report by Philip Elmer-DeWitt astounding.

Elmer-DeWitt's report cites stats AdMob Mobile Metrics that say the iPhone OS has only 8% of global smartphone market share, but generates 43% of mobile Web requests and 65% of HTML usage. Other stats:

Of the 7.5 billion AdMob ads displayed on mobile devices in 160 countries around the world, 2 billion were displayed on iPhones or iPod touches

In the United States, 20% of ad requests come from iPhones, 14.8% from iPod touches (globally, those numbers are 15.1% and 11%, respectively)

Apple’s share of U.S. ad requests grew 5.6% month over month

The iPhone’s share grew 3% in April; the iPod touch’s grew 2.6

Can't wait till the next great iPhone app PR launch for one of our clients to make those numbers pop higher!

(May 28th update: And here's a recent, excellent, Macworld review of an iPhone app we launched in March, Marketcircle's Daylite Touch.)

(Nathan Rudyk is President and CEO with market2world communications inc., Ottawa, Canada's tech PR and product marketing agency.)