Yes, you read that headline right. Take a look at the graph to the right: it's the global web traffic market share figures for the leading mobile platforms, and it shows Symbian on top, and pulling away from the fast-fading iOS.

See the Nokia Symbian Anna difference for yourself

It's certainly not quite the picture you'd expect from what counts for common wisdom doing the rounds these days. Yet the stats don't lie – StatCounter's figures count all web activity around the globe on the various operating systems, and the graph shows the picture going back to September 2009.

And it's perfectly clear when you look at the line break denoting the start of 2011 that Symbian is on the rise, and media darling iOS is on the decline, fairly rapidly so too. Behind that it's Android, which is steadily picking up pace – largely as you'd expect.

So what's happening here? Well, you could argue that iOS's decline is a result of the dramatic increase in the size of the mobile web itself. While Apple's platform undeniably deserves credit for being one of the more web-friendly around, there's no question that others have been working hard on delivering an improved mobile web experience to their users around the globe.

And as the figures show, no-one's been working harder than Nokia. The spread of Symbian^3, not to mention the more recent emergence of Symbian Anna, together with the general expansion of web-friendly features and data services like operator billing to a wider and wider range of Nokia devices is clearly having the desired effect.

So next time anyone tries to tell you that another operating system leads the way when it comes to getting its users online, you know what to tell them!