The latest numbers have come out from comScore and it has some revealing stats about the state of the U.S. smartphone market. Basically, Apple and Android are winners while RIM and Microsoft are the losers.
Perhaps helped by the Verizon iPhone, Apple iOS was able to surpass RIM’s BlackBerry OS in overall market share. Apple claimed 26.6 percent of the market while RIM had 24.7 percent, a 4.2 percent drop from February of 2011 (note: the comScore numbers deal with March 2011 figures). This is just the latest bad piece of news for RIM, as the company has been hammered by anonymous letters from employees which don’t express much confidence.
While other reports say Android isn’t growing as quickly as it once did, it’s still far and away the leading platform in the United States with 38.1 percent of the market. Google is activating half a million Android units a day now, so don’t expect that momentum to slow down anytime soon. The growth rate may not be as fast as it once was but it’s very difficult to grow from a massive user base as opposed to growing from nothing.
Microsoft’s Windows Phone doesn’t appear to be gaining much traction, as the report said it had 5.8 percent of the market, a decrease from the previous month. Windows Phone Mango will add a bunch of new features and should arrive on new hardware, so maybe that will give it a bump.
The comScore report also said that Palm (HP now) has 2.4 percent of the market and I find it funny because Palm’s Jon Rubinstein used to say that it could succeed with about that percentage of the overall market. That didn’t work. Still, with HP pushing webOS hard and devices like the Pre 3 coming out soon, webOS may gain some more traction over the next few months.
