Web use of Apple iPad already rivals Android, BlackBerry

With more than 500,000 units sold in its first week, Apple's iPad has tracked as high as 0.04 percent of total daily Web browsing, a number equal to March averages for the Android and BlackBerry platforms, according to a Web analysis firm.

Net Applications has been tracking the presence of the iPad online since the device was released on April 3. On its launch day, the iPad took an estimated 0.01 percent of all Web browser traffic, and continued to climb to its peak of 0.04 percent on April 10 and 11.

As noted by Gregg Keizer of Computerworld, the iPad's share is nearly as great as usage of BlackBerry or Google Android on the Web. In the month of March, Net Applications found that BlackBerry had an average 0.04 percent share, while Android, split between versions 1.5 and 1.6, had the exact same figure. While the iPad achieved 0.04 percent for a couple of days, it has not yet sustained those numbers.

The statistics also show that iPhone and iPod touch devices are responsible for 0.6 percent of total Web browsing, an online presence about 20 times larger than the iPad managed to achieve in its first week.

Apple this week revealed that it sold more than 500,000 iPads in the device's first week of availability. While the overall market presence of Android and BlackBerry phones dwarfs the number of iPads in the wild, the new statistics suggest that early adopters of the iPad have been far more likely to browse the Web on their new device than owners of BlackBerries or Android handsets.

Also coming in with a 0.04 percent share, like the iPad, BlackBerry and Android, was Windows ME, Microsoft's much maligned operating system released in the year 2000. For comparison, Windows XP is a whopping 64.46 percent of all Web browsing. Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard is represented by 2.13 percent of all computers on the Web, while its predecessor, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, takes up a slightly larger 2.26 percent.

Net Applications also found that Google is the dominant search engine on Apple's iPad, responsible for 97.43 percent of all searches conducted from the device. The iPad operating system, iPhone OS 3.2, has Google as the default search engine in its Mobile Safari Web browser. Users can go into the system settings and change the default to Yahoo, which carries 1.98 percent of iPad searches.

Microsoft's Bing, which has been rumored for months to potentially become the default search engine of the iPhone, was third with 0.27 percent of all iPad searches. Ask took fourth with 0.13 percent, and AOL fifth with 0.8 percent.

Early this year, the Web analysis firm found that the iPhone OS on the iPhone and iPod touch continued to grow, then taking 0.43 percent of all Web traffic. The data found that although the iPhone and iPod touch represented just 17 percent of global handsets, the two devices are responsible for 65 percent of all handheld Web browsing. Apple's ecosystem also controls half of all mobile application usage, AdMob has found.