Mobile ad network AdMob released the results of a survey of 1,000 iPhone, iPod touch and Android users today. The results are pretty telling. 

So, for example, it appears that while iPhone owners gab on the phone and take pictures, their iPod touch brethren are busy downloading and installing many more applications--80 percent more, in fact (see graph). Android ('gPhones' like the T-Mobile G1) and iPhone users download approximately 10 new apps a month, while iPod touch owners download an average of 18 per month.

It's telling how Android and iPhone smartphones owners download around the same number of applications. This is particularly interesting because the iPhone's App Store is far more populated with software than the Android Market.

The survey also found that iPod touch users really like their free apps, with 22 percent of them downloading more than 20 of them per month. Meanwhile, iPhone users download an average of 2.6 paid apps per month versus 2.0 for iPod Touch users and 1.0 for Android users.

According to the AdMob, upgrading from the lite version was the top reason given when respondents were asked what drives them to purchase a paid app, especially for the iPod touch owners--70 percent of which bought their paid apps after upgrading from the free version to 52 percent for the iPhone and 54 percent for Android.

Another highlight of the report: 90 percent of users browse and search for apps directly on their mobile device instead of their computer. No surprise there, really. Making search, discovery and installation on the iPhone and iPod touch easy is exactly what enabled Apple to revolutionize the mobile app market.

As a result, Apple forced every other major platform vendor, new and old alike, to come up with their own variations on Apple's formula for presenting and distibuting mobile applications. So you've now got, for example, Palm with the webOS App Catalog, Google with the Android Market, RIM with the BlackBerry App World,and Microsoft with the Windows Marketplace for Mobile.

Lastly, the survey found those who regularly download paid apps spend approximately $9 on an average of five paid downloads per month. That's got to be music to developers' ears.

See here for the full AdMob report.