Baidu: iPhone Now the Leading Handset Bringing Traffic to its Search Engine

Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU), China’s most-used search engine, has revealed updated statistics showing that the iPhone is far-and-away the biggest driver of search traffic amongst mobile phones in China. Indeed, the iPhone drives three-times more traffic than the next most popular phone on the list, Nokia’s 5233. You’ll have to look down to fifth and sixth places to see any Android phones making an impact on Baidu’s search pageviews:

Comparing the Q4 2011 stats with those from Baidu for the same period of 2010 reveals that the iPhone has surpassed any Nokia device for the first year ever. The old numbers (below) show that Nokia’s influence is dwindling as a whole, but Android (formerly grouped together into just one bar) is slowly gaining strength in China:

Here are some other key stats from Baidu’s report, which was released earlier this month.

Smartphone versus feature-phone usage shows that users of China’s two smaller mobile telcos, China Unicom and China Telecom, are more likely to be searching on Baidu from iPhones or Android smartphones, in contrast to the prevalence of all other platforms (eg: Symbian, a mass of JAVA OS devices, etc) that tend to be feature-phones on China Mobile:

3G usage more than doubled this year, growing steadily as more people switched from the very slowest mobile data. Indeed, we know that China saw 80 million new 3G users come on board last year:

Android and iOS users much more likely to be on 3G, which is no real surprise since many feature-phones do not support it. Interestingly, such smartphones are also much more likely to be used on wifi networks: