In college football champions aren’t decided on the field as much as they are decided by the polls. Sure, you’ve got the usual one versus two Championship game but that pairing is also based on the polls. Declaring which phone is the most popular on the net involves just as much uncertainty. But if you’re willing to put up with a fair amount of uncertainty and you like good news the AdMob has declared the iPhone the most popular mobile handset in the world. You slick piece of internet browsing and telephony went from #4 to #1. How does AdMob arrive at this conclusion? From the Washington Post:

Each month, AdMob, a mobile advertising network, rounds up the data from over 6,000 mobile websites and applications, analyzes it all, and releases their findings in their Mobile Metrics Report

Why should you be skeptical of the numbers? Well iPhone Matters has some very insightful readers and from the last time we posted AdMob results Flack had this to say:

Not sure what this proves. Their metrics are based off ad requests from mobile websites. I.E. a user goes to a website via his handsets browser and said website detects what the device is and logs it. Pretty flimsy way to generate statistics. It only logs from sites that use Admob for their advertising engine. Hence.... predominantly mobile websites. Devices with more robust browsers won’t necessarily goto/be redirected to a mobile site where AdMob could log them.

Now you can take Flack’s analysis either way. It might mean that the stats aren’t worth much but you could also conclude that the iPhone is under reported. Either way the AdMob results are highly reported and being number one in any category (except number one in suck) is good news for the iPhone.