iPhone, Android smartphones gain at BlackBerry's cost

BANGALORE, INDIA: Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android are seeing ever-greater adoption in the US as RIM continues to see its share decline

According to numbers in the latest Nielsen Wire report Apple’s iPhone and devices based on Google’s Android operating system continue to lead the growing smartphone market that is now as large at the feature phone market.

The report identifies that iPhone’s growth is fueled with the with the declining sales of Research In Motion's BlackBerry phones, which is nearly tied with the “other” category in the percentage of people who say they’ve bought a smartphone over the three months leading up to the Nielsen survey.

Android on the rise

Google’s Android OS — which is used by a wide variety of device makers, from Samsung and Motorola to HTC and LG Electronics — now holds about 48 percent of the smartphone market in the United States. Almost a third — 32.1 percent — of smartphone owners said they own an Apple iPhone, while BlackBerry accounted for 11.6 percent of the smartphones on the US market, according to Nielsen.

The numbers changed — significantly for Apple and RIM — when Nielsen surveyed people who had bought a smartphone in the previous three months. Forty-eight percent of those people surveyed in February chose an Android-based device, keeping in line with the Android numbers in the overall smartphone market.

However, 43 percent of new owners said they bought an iPhone, while 5 percent said they chose a BlackBerry device.

The numbers reflect what analysts and journalists heard on 29 March during a conference call with new RIM chief executive Thorsten Heins, who said that the BlackBerry maker needed to pull away a bit from the consumer market and focus on its strength in the enterprise.

Heins’ comments were part of a larger discussion about the need to restructure RIM in the wake of struggles over the past couple of years, as Apple and Google-driven devices have eaten away at BlackBerry’s market share.

RIM declining

In the previous fiscal quarter, RIM saw its bad news continue, seeing a 25 percent drop in revenue over the same period last year and posting a $125 million loss. The company shipped 11.1 million BlackBerry smartphones and more than 500,000 BlackBerry PlayBook tablets.

Smartphones are rapidly growing in popularity, according to Nielsen’s numbers. According to the survey, 49.7 percent of all US mobile subscribers now own smartphones, as of February. That compares with 36 percent of subscribers in February 2011, a 38 percent increase year-over-year.

More than two-thirds of those who bought a mobile phone in the three months leading up to the survey bought a smartphone, Nielsen said.