AdMob, the world’s largest mobile advertising marketplace, has released some interesting data about mobile web browsing and the devices that are doing it the most.

The data captures some trends that I think alot of people in the mobile industry are already are aware of, namely if the on phone browser is bad then mobile browsing won’t happen that much. AdMob goes a step further to provide some hard numbers to support this and shows some concerning downward trends in mobile browsing activity on Nokia and RIM devices, but big uptick trends in mobile browsing from iPhone, Android and Palm Pre.

This will make our atfollow.com product managers happy seeing they are focused on providing a mobile browser based real time data following service on iPhone, Android and Palm Pre devices.

Data from AdMob…

“In August, AdMob found that 40 percent of queries came from iPhones, up from 33 percent six months ago. Android users hitting AdMob sites grew to 7 percent of users, up from 2 percent in February. The Palm Pre — which only just launched in June — had 4 percent of traffic in August.

Users of Nokia’s Symbian phones who hit AdMob’s ads dropped from 43 percent in February to 34 percent last month. BlackBerry users fell from driving 10 percent of traffic six months ago to 8 percent in August. Windows Mobile phones went from generating 7 percent of hits to AdMob sites in February to 4 percent in August.”

All AdMob data is available here.

The big opportunity still rests in the hands of Nokia and RIM who have about a 60% combined marketshare of smartphones shipped globally. Get a good browser and you are serious contenders to keep that number growing. RIM has made some moves to acquire some new browser engineering talent of late and Nokia is now shipping a Mozilla based browser with the new N900. We will see if their next gen smartphones keep with this trend.

The Palm Pre smartphone has been receiving stellar reviews on the whole across the web Engadget, Gizmodo, CNET.

In a recent article by The Globe and Mail Palm’s plan for Pre apps the question is posed as to how Palm intends to make this device a consumer success given it only has about a dozen or so apps available at present versus tens of thousands of apps for competing devices like the iPhone™.

On the surface it seems like the classic chicken and egg scenario for Palm.

Not enough apps, consumers don’t want the device. Not enough consumers with the device, developers won’t build apps for it. But can Palm make the Pre a legitimate contender to the iPhone™ with only modest growth in apps? I think they can and here is why.

The mobile browser.

Tons of services can now be experienced in the mobile browser with the same quality as a downloaded software app. Just the way desktop apps have given way to the browser, the same can happen on mobile devices.

In the case of @follow™, we made the decision to build a browser based service instead of native apps for each mobile platform such as iPhone, Android, Palm, Windows Mobile, RIM and Symbian. It’s not to say we won’t roll out native apps over time for specific platforms, but in order to get on as many devices as possible with the same exact code base, going after the mobile web browser was the correct choice for us.

This is why I think the Palm Pre is wide open for creative web developers. Hunt through the Apple app store and pick a bunch of apps that can be recreated as a web app, build them and right away you have Palm Pre owners as an audience.