Motorola, RIM Leading U.S. Mobile Device Market

Motorola and BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion led a three-month snapshot of mobile device use in the United States, according to Feb. 8 report from comScore.
The company, which offers “digital marketing intelligence,” collected data on the U.S. mobile phone industry from September through December 2009 and ranked the leading mobile OEMs and smartphone operating system platforms.
In September, the firm reported, Motorola held 24.9 percent of mobile device market share in the United States, followed by LG with 21.7 percent and Samsung with 20.4 percent. Following at a distance were Nokia, with 9.6 percent market share, and RIM with 6.4 percent.
In December, however, Motorola and Nokia each ceded a teeny portion of percentage points to Samsung, which increased its share by 0.8 percent, RIM, which nudged up 0.6 percent and LG, which grew a modest 0.2 percent.
In total, in December, 234 million people 13 years and older were using mobile devices.
When the smartphone users among them were divvied out, however, RIM moved to the head of the class, as its OS accounted for 42.6 percent of the U.S. smartphone OS market in September; in December, that number dipped slightly to 41.6 percent.
Apple held the number-two position, with 24.1 percent market share in September and 25.3 percent in December, and Microsoft followed, with a 19 percent in September, which fell 1 percentage point in December.
Fourth-place Palm started strong in September, with 8.3 percent of the market, but lost 2.2 points over the holiday shopping season, while Google, which had 2.5 percent market share in September, boosted that by 5.2 percent in December.
The one consistent trend that comScore found is that we’re all becoming more tech savvy – or is it inclined? In every category in which it tracked mobile content use, December numbers, to degrees varying from 0.2 to 2.1 percent, topped those from September.
In December, 63.1 percent of us sent a text message to another phone, 27.5 percent used a mobile browser and 21.6 percent played games on their devices.
Applications were downloaded by 17.8 percent of users, 15.9 percent hopped on social networking sites or blogs, and – amid the hubbub of December activities – only 12.1 percent of us used our phones to play some tunes.
According to a Jan. 29 report from Strategy Analytics, the global handset market saw 324 million units ship during the fourth quarter of 2009.