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According to the latest numbers from Nielsen, the growth patterns of the mobile operating ecosystem have stabilized in the last several months. Android, which enjoyed wild growth to become the market leader in 2010, has topped out with a consistent 36% of the mobile OS market share while Apple's iOS hovers around 26% and Blackberry has stopped its bleeding around 23%.

Android users are also the most data hungry of smartphone users. Nielsen's shows data between February and April 2011 including data and application usage. The average Android user consumes 582 megabytes of data per month, against 492 MBs for iOS Users.

We just came across this great infographic which provides a visualization of the various mobile operating system market shares from around the world and how each platform's share differs from region to region. The data is pulled from Statcounter, so it may not be the most accurate representation of mobile data there is, but it's probably not too far off, at least in general terms.

Online tracking firm Quantcast has just released new data that shows mobile operating systems' current market share in North America, with the newly renamed "iOS" (originally called "iPhone OS" - the OS powering the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch) in the lead...by miles. The Apple mobile OS dominates its competitors with a huge chunk of mobile market share, at 60%.

But don't let these numbers fool you. It's not how much or how little of the mobile landscape each OS has claim to, but how fast this picture has changed over the preceding months. The real winner here is Android, the OS whose rapid gains have come at Apple's expense.

Nokia and Intel have just announced the creation of MeeGo, a new Linux-based operating system designed for portable devices including netbooks and smartphones as well as other non-desktop platforms like connected TVs and vehicles. The new OS is a combination of Nokia's Maemo and Intel's Moblin, both Linux-based computing environments. This partnership is notable not just for combining two different Linux platforms under one roof, but for its cross-platform support of both Intel and ARM chips, the latter currently popular in mobile devices like Apple's iPhone thanks to its low power consumption needs.

According to new data from ChangeWave Research, both usage and consumer sentiment towards Google's mobile operating system Android has increased over the past several months. As of December 2009, the research firm's survey shows that 4% of all smartphone owners now use a phone running some version of the Android OS. That's an increase of 200% since the previous survey released in September.

The Motorola Droid is the newest smartphone on the market to compete for the iPhone's crown. Released by Verizon Wireless on November 6th, the Droid's advertising campaign has been a full-frontal attack on the popular Apple smartphone with a heavy focus on what the iPhone doesn't do. "iDon't run simultaneous apps, iDon't have a real keyboard, iDon't take 5-megapixel pictures," taunts Verizon's Droid ad.

But did the message get through to potential phone buyers? It appears that it did...at least according to mobile analytics firm Flurry. In their latest report, the company found that the Droid is now the fastest-selling Android phone to date, beating the sales of the myTouch 3G by more than four times.