As the 2009 calendar year draws to a close, we look back at a year that was defined by smartphones and the iPhone’s arch nemesis, the Android OS. But, that doesn’t mean the iPhone has dropped of Americans’ radars. In fact, a new study from Nielson crowns the iPhone as the most popular mobile phone in the US for almost all of 2009. Based on Nielson’s numbers, Apple’s iPhone was being used by 4% of wireless subscribers from January through October of this year, followed closely by RIM’s BlackBerry Curve 8300 lineup, which were used by 3.7% of people with cellphones.
Surprisingly, Motorola’s legacy lives on in its RAZR V3 lineup. After pumping out millions of RAZRs while their design team seemed to sit idly by, Motorola has left a lasting mark on the US wireless ecosystem. To this day, 2.3% of mobile phone users had a RAZR V3 variant in their pockets.
The study also found that people who chose to go the pre-paid route tended to do so because the plans were more straightforward, that 21% of US households used only cellphones, and that 15% of households now had at least one smartphone.
Now, before you go off about how great the iPhone is and how it just makes sense that it’s the most popular phone of 2009, consider this: if you clump together all of RIM’s BlackBerry phones into one massive category, they would easily eclipse the iPhone’s market share. But, then again, that’s not going to stop the hype machine from backing the iPhone, so why should you?
[Via: AppleInsider]