For the quarter, Android’s market share rose to 47.3 percent, according to ComScore, up from 44.8 in the prior quarter.
But while Apple outsold Samsung with respect to smartphones, a significant volume of feature phone sales boosted Samsung second place overall at 22.8 percent market share, up from 20 percent last year.
While Android’s share rose from 46.9 percent in November,
it is iOS that finished the year on a strong note.
The growth spurt came courtesy of two and a half months
of sales of the popular iPhone 4S on AT&T (NYSE:T), Verizon Wireless and
Sprint (NYSE:S).
Record sales of Apple’s iPhone in the fourth quarter pushed the company into third place among all mobile phone vendors, up from fifth place last year.
The top Android OEMshipped 36 million smartphone units, up from 28 million the
quarter before, according to market
research firm IHS iSuppli.
In third place, Research In Motion’s (NASDAQ:RIMM) BlackBerry platform
continued its slide, ending 2011 with 16 percent share, down from 16 percent in November and nearly
20 percent in August.
With volumes down 8.2 percent year-over-year, Nokia is holding on to the top spot with 26.6 percent share.
The company is betting on its BlackBerry 10 operating
system to help sell more phones.
Analyst Peter Misek said
new RIM Chief executive officer Thorsten Heins is likely to move away from its alleged plans to license
BB10 to Samsung and launch new BlackBerry messaging, email and social
networking applications for iOS and Android platforms for a monthly fee.
"We believe decelerating efforts to offer
enterprises the ability to get their fast secure Blackberry e-mail on an iPhone
or an Android device is a mistake," Misek wrote in a Feb.
The Canadian company has been on a downward spiral, having lost market share to Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android devices.
Nokia’s smartphone market share declined sharply in recent quarters, particularly after failed attempts to replace its Symbian mobile OS.
Microsoft’s Windows Phone lost almost a point in market share, giving it 4.7 percent, while Nokia’s Symbian fell even further with a 1.4 percent share.
Nokia’s chairman, Jorma Ollila, said on Wednesday that he expects 2012 to be a rough year for the company as it transitions to Windows Phone, according to Reuters.
The Lumia 900 in particular wowed watchers at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show.
Overall, smartphone penetration continued its ascendance through
the end of 2011.
ComScore counted about 98 million smartphone users in the US
through December, accounting for 40 percent of all US mobile users, and up from 91.4 percent in November.
Michael Johnson is a business journalist based in New York, US. Michael has a passion for financial markets and breaking news stories and loves writing about business news, stock market, and economic opinions that matters most to its audience. Michael spends a lot of time discovering and researching latest financial markets and industry news stories in order to make sure the latest and greatest stories are brought to you first on BigBoardNews.com.
