Android take-up soars in US and Europe

Figures fest

Despite sluggish sales of its new handset, RIM's BlackBerry is still the US' favourite smartphone os, although Android is the only platform gaining market share.

Data from comScore's July report, found 53.4m people in the US own smartphones, a rise of 11 percent since April. RIM remains the leading smartphone platform with a near 40 percent share of the market, followed by Apple with a 23.8 percent share.

Although these figures sound great, it is worth noting that both platforms have lost market share since April, perhaps as consumers were turned off by the iPhone 4's problems or were tempted by cheaper offerings. RIM's share slipped by 1.8 percent while lost 1.3 percent.

However, although Google's Android only has the third largest share in the US smartphone os market, at 17 percent in July, it has added a staggering 5 percent since April, making it the only platform that has gained new subscribers.

Here is a table of the top five biggest players' market share.

Phone flavours

In terms of phone manufacturers, the report also found Samsung was the most popular among the 234m Americans ages 13 plus, with 23.1 percent of people touting one of its handsets this July, up 1 percent from April.

LG ranked second with a close 21.3 percent share, followed by Motorola commanding almost 20 percent of the market, then RIM with 9 percent and Nokia with a 7.8 percent share.

The study also looked at how consumers used their phones. Despite more technical features becoming available on phones, people texted more in July than they did in April, with two in three Americans sending SMS messages.

However, more people used their phones to listen to music and access social networking sites. There was also a 1.6 percent rise in people who downloaded apps, which is now close to 1 in three people. However, perhaps surprisingly given the increasing popularity of gaming apps, there was a tiny drop in the number of people who played games on their phones.