The US smartphone market (new research)

Two-thirds of mobile phones purchased in the U.S. in the second quarter of 2012 were smartphones. This is one of the results of the latest study of the American smartphone market conducted by Nielsen – see the rest inside.

The degree of Android penetration continues to grow – last June, the share of smartphones with this OS was 51.8% (in the first quarter it was 50.4%). The next most popular is Apple’s iOS with 34%.

But Apple remains the largest smartphone manufacturer – Samsung is significantly behind.

A slight increase in the shares of Android and iOS occurred, among other things, due to another drop in RIM’s BlackBerry, which, despite this, still managed to stay in third place with a share of 8.1%. Nevertheless, RIM does not represent serious competition to the first two players, and there is clearly room for a third “force” to appear on the market. The question is who will eventually become her.

BlackBerry still has chances – somehow it still manages to “come” third in the overall standings. According to Thorsten Heins, CEO of RIM, they pin their hopes on the fact that existing and upcoming devices on BlackBerry 7 will help them stay afloat until the moment when they will be able to release devices on BlackBerry 10 next year.

At the same time, Microsoft has high hopes for the release of Windows Phone 8 this fall, i.e. before the mega-OS from RIM. But this alone is not enough to win – it matters a lot how quickly users can switch to a new system, and Microsoft clearly has problems with this.  So, currently, the share of the old Windows Mobile OS is still greater than the share of Windows Phone (3% vs. 1.3%).