RIM Rules The Smartphone Roost, But Android Advancing
That's the word from Web researcher ComScore, which this week released another of its periodic reports on mobile subscriber market share. According to ComScore, for a three-month period starting at the beginning of March and ending on May 31, RIM held a 41.7 percent market share of smartphone platforms in the U.S., followed by Apple at 24.4 percent, Microsoft at 13.2 percent, Google at 13 percent, and Palm with 4.8 percent.
Of all of those platforms, according to ComScore, Android was the only one to make a significant gain in share, up four points from the 9 percent share ComScore had awarded it at the end of February. By contrast, RIM lost 0.4 points, Apple lost a full point, Microsoft lost 1.9 points and Palm lost 0.6 points.
ComScore's numbers may be misleading. Since the period they cover ends in May, they don't reflect Apple bounce from the wildly successful launch of iPhone 4, which was released in June. They also don't include June sales data for any Android phones, some of which, along with iPhone 4, ranked among CRN's 10 Coolest Smartphones of the Year, So Far.
Also in ComScore's data: for the three-month period, 234 million people in the U.S. owned mobile devices. Among mobile manufacturers, Samsung claims the top spot with a 22.4 percent share, and LG, Motorola, RIM and Nokia round out the top five.
ComScore further notes that 65.2 percent of mobile subscribers surveyed for the three-month period use text messaging, 31.9 percent surf the Internet, and 20.8 percent access social networking tools and blogs.