Android’s gain is RIM and Microsoft’s loss in the US

Time to get paranoid

US digital activity tracker comScore has published its quarterly look at the US mobile market and it provides some interesting insights into how things are evolving on the other side of the pond.

In the smartphone market RIM is still the top dog by a considerable margin, but its share is declining rapidly due entirely to the growth of Android. Google's mobile OS gained 6.6 points of market share in the June-August quarter, with Microsoft being the other to suffer at its hands, while Apple kept hold of around a quarter of the market.

It's actually a bit of a surprise to see Microsoft still clinging to ten percent of the smartphone OS market, with its new effort just days away. Palm clinging onto around five percent of the market is a bit of a surprise too, considering the state of flux it has been in since the HP acquisition. We guess long contracts have something to do with it.

Not represented in the table below is the additional statistic that the 55.7 million people in the US who own smartphones represent a 14 percent increase on just three months earlier. This means that even those platforms losing share to Android still saw an increase in users.

In the feature-phone market the Koreans consolidated their position in the US market at the expense of third placed Motorola, which isn't too surprising given its preoccupation with Android smartphones. The size of Nokia's task is well illustrated, while at least one OEM outside the top 5 must be doing well for most of the list to be in negative territory.