The winner, according to Net Applications: mobile operating systems, which accounted for 1.3% of all OSes powering devices that browsed the Internet in December. Although their shares remained small -- the largest was Java Platform, Micro Edition, with just 0.53%, followed by the iPhone OS with 0.44% -- month-over-month increases were dramatic in some cases. Google's Android operating system, for example, increased its share by nearly 56% between November and December, while RIM and the iPhone boosted their shares by 22% and 20%, respectively.

Net Applications measures operating system usage by tracking the machines that surf to the 40,000 sites it monitors for clients, which results in a pool of about 160 million unique visitors each month. It then weights share by the estimated size of each country's Internet population.

can be found on Net Applications' site.

Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news for Computerworld . Follow Gregg on Twitter @gkeizer , send e-mail at gkeizer@ix.netcom.com or subscribe to Gregg's RSS feed .

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