Android & iPhone Dominate Smartphone Market at BlackBerryâ€™s Expe

**Waqas** · August 31, 2011

Google and Apple continue to eat up more of the smartphone market, while RIM and Microsoft continue to lose ground.

According to new data from comScore, 82.2 million people in the U.S. owned smartphone as of July 2011, a full 10% increase from April 2011. During this time, Google and Apple were big winners. Google is the market leader with 41.8% market share (up from 36.4% in April), while Apple is #2 with 27% market share (up from 26%).

The news isn’t as bright for RIM, Microsoft or Nokia though. RIM’s BlackBerry was the big loser, as its piece of the smartphone market dropped from 25.7% to 21.7% in just three months. Microsoft also experienced a drop from 6.7% to 5.7%. Nokia’s Symbian OS, which is on its way to retirement, dropped from 2.3% to 1.9%.

comScore also reports that 234 million Americans 13 and older use some type of mobile device, whether it’s a smartphone or not. Among the entire smartphone market, Samsung is the leader with a 25.5% share of U.S. mobile subscribers. LG and Motorola are next with 20.9% and 14.1% respectively. Apple is forth with 9.5% of the total market, an increase of 1.2% since April. RIM rounds out the top five at 7.6%.

Among these 234 million mobile Americans, more of them are using their phones for a variety of tasks. A full 70% of U.S. mobile subscribers are texting, up 1.2% from April. 41.1% use their phones for web browsing (up 2%) and 40.6% have used a downloaded app (up 2.8%). Social networking (30.1%), playing mobile games (27.8%) and listening to music (20.3%) are all up as well.

It’s tough to predict what will happen to the mobile market in the next few years. One report asserts that Windows Phone will overtake iOS by 2015, though we highly doubt that possibility, even with Nokia switching to WP7. For now though, Apple and Google are in a comfortable position, and it doesn’t look like there are any challengers ready to knock them off their perches.

More About: android, apple, ComScore, Google, iOS, iphone, microsoft, mobile phones, RIM, windows phone 7

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