Google’s green little robot is gaining some ground in the smartphone market but it’s still way behind Apple’s iPhone and Research In Motion’s BlackBerry, according to data released by comScore.
Thanks to the success of handsets like the Motorola Droid, Android has 9% of the U.S. smartphone market at the end of February 2010. This is an increase of 5.2 percentage points since the last comScore report, released in November 2009. It’s a good sign for Google and Android fans, and I’d expect this trend to continue as cool new handsets like the HTC Incredible, Samsung Galaxy S and EVO 4G hit the market.
Apple’s staying consistent with its iPhone market share, as it continues to account for about a quarter of all U.S. smartphones. I don’t expect Apple to lose market share any time soon because it has multiple prices points, a really good marketing team and we’re sure to see some neat stuff with the 4.0 software that will pave the way for the next-generation iPhone this summer.
RIM may not be as exciting as Android or as trendy as the iPhone, but the BlackBerry is just killing it with 42.1% of the market. How are they doing it? They have a deep enterprise base (they often deploy handsets to businesses in batches of thousands), have a variety of devices on every carrier and they’re making a bigger push into the mainstream market with big television ads. The IntoMobile team is gearing up for BlackBerry’s WES conference near the end of the month and all signs are pointing to the introduction of the BlackBerry slider.
As for the other players, Microsoft’s dropping like a stone and now has 15.1% and poor Palm only has 5.4%. Overall, there are now 45.4 million smartphone users in the United States and that’s only going to grow as handsets get cheaper and as carrier’s aggressively try to get people on data plans.
[Via comScore, hat tip to TechCrunch]