I have a Google Nexus One phone on T-Mobile’s network, so I can use the handy T-Mobile MyAccount app to keep track of how many calls I’ve made during the current billing period. The app also tracks text messages and lets me pay my bill. But that doesn’t mean there’s not room on my phone for an app that provides much more information about what my phone has been up to.

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PhoneUsage is a free utility that tracks phone calls, text messages, and data use and plots everything in a series of charts.

On the home screen, you can click the tabs for Today, This Week, last Month, or 2 Months Ago to see your information at a glance. But things get really interesting when you hit the Calls, Texts, or Data tabs. That’s where you can see detailed charts showing your incoming and outgoing calls plotted by day of month, time of day, or day of week. You can also see the top people you’ve communicated with by volume.

You can tap the “Period” button to adjust the time frame for the carts, and PhoneUsage also lets you tap on any chart to see it in full-screen, landscape mode.

My only complaint is that you have to use PhoneUsage for a little while before you’ll get the most out of this app. When I first loaded it, the app managed to track my recent phone calls, but it didn’t notice incoming and outgoing text messages or recent data usage. Once I started using 3G data after installing the app, the data chart started to fill in.

I suspect PhoneUsage also doesn’t know the difference between in-network and out-of-network calls, which means you might not want to use this app as your sole guide of whether you’re about to go over your monthly minutes. But it can definitely give you a pretty good idea of how you’re using your Android smartphone.

PhoneUsage is available as a free download from the Android Market. There’s also a Pro version that runs £1.49 (about $2.29) which will alert you when you’re about to break user-defined usage limits. The Pro version also includes Home Screen widgets.

Google Android market penetration is growing at a pretty fast pace… but according to a new report from mobile advertising firm AdMob, the vast majority of Android users are still on phones using Android 1.5 or 1.6.

The report says that 11 devices accounted for 96 percent of all Android traffic last month, with the Motorola Droid leading the pack with 32 percent of traffic. That phone happens to be on Android 2.0 or 2.1, but most of the other handsets aren’t. Overall, 12 device manufacturers offered 34 different Android devices in March, 2010, and 38 percent of them were running Android 1.5 with 26 percent running Android 1.6.

Basically what’s going on here is that Google doesn’t get to automatically push out software and operating system updates to most of those phones. When Google releases an OS update, it makes it available to device makers and wireless carriers who can then figure out if and how to make the software available to users. Since most phones run some custom software on top of Google Android, it can often take a while before software updates are available.

Some handset makers are also still putting out new phones running older versions of Android, which complicates matters a bit.

Apple, on the other hand, controls all of the software and hardware for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. When a software update is available, Apple pushes it out directly to end users, which leads to significantly less platform fragmentation. AdMob reports that more than 86% of iPhone OS traffic last month came from devices running the two most current versions of the operating system, version 3.1.2 and 3.1.3.  That could change later this year, since iPhone OS 4.0 won’t be compatible with the first generation iPhone.

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