At this rate, the iPhone/iPod platform should be the third largest computing platform by the end of 2008.

This was the dramatic claim in one recent article backed up by some semi decent statistics. This is only one view but the calcs we did below do show that allowing for three factors -

• time on market,
• handsets sold and
• % of web browsing done

Apple’s iPhone/iTouch is killing Microsoft Windows CE in the mobile web application usage and adoption.

In fact they are more than 87 times more effective at driving customer usage which is the ultimate test. What a great testimony to usability and one of the reasons more than 90% of our saasu.com features (by use) are available within one click.

To really understand how good it is, watch a video or two on the apple site.

Here at Saasu.com, we like mobile access, a lot. Not everyone needs it and most people won’t use it as their main platform ever. But it is useful and for many segments such as mobile professionals and service segments it is a major productivity jump.

We have been quietly working on mobile capabilities here at Saasu.com and had our stuff working the iphone/itouch some months ago. We wanted to tweak a bit more before announcing it but as usual in this ‘youtube.com democracy age’ our clients who are real fans of saasu beat us to it.

We are also launching some special extensions next year to support mobile financial management across platforms. Sign up for the blog feed so you see it when it arrives.

Rough calculations follow (from above article and related links) -

TOM – Time On Market

• Apple iphone 5 months, itouch 3 months
• Microsoft Windows 10+ years but we will assume 18months to allow for ramp up etc..

Footprint – Handsets/devices sold

• Apple 1.4m
• Microsoft 20m

Web Browsing Market Share

• Apple iPhone 0.09%, iTouch 0.01%
• MS Windows CE 0.06%

Weighting the three factors, the effectiveness in shaping consumer adoption is Apple 18/5 * 20/1.4 * 0.1/0.06 = 3.6 * 14.3 * 1.7 = 87+

Footnote: In Australia our home base, the iPhone is not officially available yet but the iTouch is being marketed heavily for Xmas and there are a fair few US imports that have been modified (hacked is probably a better term) to provide most of the features here (not visual voice mail for example however).