Android, Samsung top U.S. mobile phone market
Android continues to rank as the top smartphone platform, while Samsung retains its lead as the leading mobile phone maker across the U.S.
Android has widened its lead as the top smartphone OS in the U.S., according to the latest stats from ComScore.
For the three months ending September, Google's mobile platform grabbed 44.8 percent of the market, an increase of almost 5 points from the prior quarter. Apple's iOS retained second place with a 27.4 percent share of U.S. smartphone owners, up slightly from the previous period.
Android and iOS were the only two smartphone operating systems to gain market share.
RIM's BlackBerry took third place with 18.9 percent, a drop of almost 5 percent. That left Microsoft's Windows Phone and Nokia's Symbian trailing the charts, each having lost a small fraction of a point from the prior quarter, according to ComScore.
Among handset makers, Samsung kept its lead, although its market share remained flat. LG and Motorola took second and third place, respectively, each losing more than half a percentage point from the previous quarter.
Though in fourth place with 10.2 percent, Apple was the only mobile phone manufacturer to see its share rise. And RIM was again stuck in last place with 7.1 percent of the market.
Samsung has been climbing the charts lately in the mobile phone arena. The Korean handset maker recently topped Apple with a higher number of smartphone shipments around the world, according to both IDC and Strategy Analytics.
For the quarter, text messaging proved the most popular activity, noted ComScore, with 71 percent of mobile phone users sending and receiving texts. Mobile browsers were used by amost 43 percent, downloading apps was done by 42.5 percent, and tapping into social networks or blogs was a favorite task among 31.5 percent.
To compile its data. ComScore surveyed more than 30,000 U.S. mobile subscribers through its MobiLens service.