Market statistician Net Applications says on its Web site that Apple iPhones currently account for .09% of Web browsing, while all Windows Mobile devices put together account for only .06%. That's pretty astonishing, given the relative numbers of handheld devices running each OS in the marketplace.Those numbers are truly low. Given the total volume of Web page retrievals, the difference between nine one-hundredths of 1% and six one-hundredths of a percent is a gnat's eyelash. But Net Applications finds them persuasive, and they confirm a conclusion I came to last summer when I wrote a piece on browsing the Web on a smartphone: it works a lot better on an iPhone than it does on a Windows Mobile handheld.

Another report published last week by Daniel Dilger in his "Roughly Drafted" blog claims that iPhone also is outselling all Windows Mobile devices combined in the U.S. market (but, to be sure, still trails RIM's BlackBerry).

Dilger cites statistics from analyst firm Canalys that I can't find on the Web (see comments below), and his blog is a little too consistently kind to Apple, but his piece does make interesting reading. And his stats are supported by analyst firm NPD, which recently calculated that the iPhone held 27% of the smartphone market in the United States (and the smartphone market has almost tripled over the past year to hold 11% of all mobile phone sales, which also is astonishing growth.)

If all these statistics are reliable, it just could be that Microsoft is losing out in the growth market for mobile operating systems. Whatever the numbers, Microsoft isn't about to be put out of business. Net Applications says 78.3% of all Web browsing in the United States is done from devices running Windows XP, while Apple OSes, whether Intel-based, Power PC, or iPhone, account for just 6.9%. But the mobile market certainly doesn't seem to be going Microsoft's way -- and Google's Android looks like it will only make the fight tougher.