After just two months as the second-place dog in the U.S. smart phone platform race, Google’s Android OS leapfrogged RIM’s BlackBerry OS in January, according to comScore.
The report notes that 65.8 million Americans owned smart phones during the three months ending in January, up 8 percent from the previous three-month period. Of this segment, 31.2 percent owned Android devices, marking the first time Google’s mobile OS has claimed the No. 1 spot. This marked a 7.7-percentage-point increase from the 23.5 percent share it held in October.
RIM was second with 30.4 percent of the U.S. market, down 5.4 points from its 35.8 percent share in October.
Apple’s iOS ranked third with 24.7 percent, up just 0.1 points from its 24.6 percent share in October. Meanwhile, Microsoft held 8 percent o the market, down 1.7 points from its 9.7 percent share in October. Palm had 3.2 percent of the market in January, down 0.7 points from its 3.9 percent share in October.
Samsung remained the top-ranked mobile handset manufacturer in January with 24.9 percent of the market, up 0.7 points from its 24.2 percent share in October. LG was second with 20.8 percent of the market, down 0.2 points from its 21 percent share in October.
Meanwhile, Motorola was third with 16.5 percent of the market, followed by RIM with 8.6 percent and Apple with 7 percent.
According to comScore, the most popular form of mobile content usage in January was sending a text message to another phone, with 68.1 percent of subscribers saying they take part in this activity. This was unchanged from the same share of mobile subscribers who said they participated in this activity back in October.
Using a browser was second with 37 percent of the response, followed by using downloaded apps with 35.3 percent, accessing social networking sites or blogs with 25.3 percent, playing games with 23.7 percent, and listening to music on mobile phones with 16.5 percent.
Nielsen also recently released figures regarding the mobile realm and showed that Android had a 29 percent share of the market from November through January. When broken down by manufacturers, HTC led the Android pack with 12 percent of all smart phones, followed by Motorola with 10 percent, Samsung with 5 percent and other manufacturers with 2 percent.
Apple and RIM followed with 27 percent each, while Windows Mobile had 10 percent.
A report from Macquarie Group using data from Efficient Frontier found that nearly 97 percent of mobile search spend goes to Google, with 3.2 percent going to Bing/Yahoo. Nearly 5 percent of paid-search spending in the U.S. now goes to mobile efforts.
Sources:
http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/who-is-winning-the-u-s-smartphone-battle/
http://searchengineland.com/google-controls-97-percent-of-mobile-paid-search-report-66876
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