Android Continues to Surge, as Desirable as iPhone Devices
According to the latest MobiLens report from comScore, smart phones are now owned by a quarter of all mobile subscribers, and Android is continuing its greedy surge in the smart-phone OS market.
The three-month average period ending in October saw 234 million Americans ages 13 and older using mobile devices. Of this user base, 24.2 percent owned Samsung devices, up 1.1 percentage points from its 23.1 percent share of the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) market in July.
LG followed with 21.0 percent of the market, down 0.2 points, while Motorola was third with 17.7 percent, down 2.1 points.
RIM was in fourth with 9.3 percent of the market, up 0.3 points, while Nokia was fifth with 7.1 percent of the OEM market in October, down 0.7 points from July.
comScore notes that 60.7 million Americans owned a smart phone during the three months ending in October, up 14 percent from the previous three-month period. This accounts for about one out of every four mobile subscribers. RIM led the way with 35.8 percent of the smart-phone market, down 3.5 percentage points from its 39.3 percent share in July.
Apple was second with 24.6 percent of the market, up 0.8 points from its share in July. Google was third with 23.5 percent of the market, up 6.5 points from July.
Microsoft held 9.7 percent of the market, down 2.1 points. Palm was fifth with 3.9 percent of the smart-phone platform market, down 1.0 point.
“Despite losing share to Android, most smartphone platforms continue to gain subscribers as the smartphone market overall continues to grow,” the report notes.
According to Nielsen, when mobile users who planned to upgrade to a smart phone in the next year were asked which operating system they wanted, Apple’s iOS (30 percent) was virtually tied with Google’s Android (28 percent) for the title of “most desired” OS.
The splits varied when divided by gender, as a bigger share of female users wanted an iPhone as their next smart-phone OS, while a bigger share of males desired an Android device.
All forms of mobile content usage grew in popularity during the three months from July to October, according to comScore. Sending text messages to another phone remained the most popular with 68.1 percent of the response, up 2.1 percentage points. Using a mobile browser was second with 36.2 percent, up 2.6 points.
Using downloaded apps (33.7 percent), accessing social networking sites or blogs (24.2 percent), playing games (23.7 percent) and listening to music (15.4 percent) were also popular forms of mobile content usage.
Sources:</strong
http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/us-smartphone-battle-heats-up/
