Joerg Krahnert, managing director of Netbiscuits in Singapore, said the report was compiled based on questions asked by its customers every day.

“Which devices really matter for my mobile strategy? How important is the Long Tail of devices in my market and industry? What impact will technologies such as HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript have on mobile in the near future?” are some of the questions posed.

“Our new Mobile Web Device Report gives the answers based on valid data that our platform generates while delivering mobile sites to more than 2,900 different types of mobile devices worldwide,” Krahnert added.

The report also contains data on the market share of relevant smartphone operating systems on a global, regional and per-market basis and sheds some light on the ratio between dominating versus Long Tail devices on all levels. The information is based on metrics generated from over 4.5 billion mobile pages requests processed by Netbiscuits’ mobile publishing platform every month.

With the hype now on HTML5 the report demonstrates that it is far from being the answer to all questions facing mobile web application developers today, based on a survey carried out in Malaysia.

“Our results show that out of 18 different HTML5 features tested not one of them was fully supported by all top 15 devices in the Malaysian market”, Krahnert revealed.

“Even those features that are most widely discussed in the mobile industry today, such as Geolocation API, are still only implemented on one third of the top 15 devices in Malaysia. As a consequence, we embrace HTML5 technology but we do not solely rely on it to implement rich UX features across multiple mobile devices.”

In terms of smartphone operating systems the report acknowledges a trend towards a growing number of relevant platforms in the Malaysian market.

“Symbian is still dominating the smartphone segment in Malaysia with 44% of all site requests coming from the S60 platform”, said Krahnert. “Apple iOS has 33% market share followed by Android (12%) and RIM (8%). Compared to previous years the dominating role of Symbian has begun to crumble heavily.”

In line with the results of previous reports published by Netbiscuits, the relevance of Long Tail mobile devices used for accessing the web is still unbroken.

“More than 77% of all mobile site requests processed by Netbiscuits in Malaysia are from Long Tail devices. From 707 different types of devices that we detected in Malaysia 705 are situated in the Long Tail. That’s a huge number of devices you have to tailor your content and services for, if you want to reach out to 100 percent of your potential audience.” Krahnert said.

Netbiscuits’ Mobile Web Device Report is available as a free download. It provides 37 tables, graphs and pie charts filled with information on the mobile web today.