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August data from research outfit Nielsen shows that Android devices are now the most popular smartphone in the US market over the last six months.
The Nielsen Company wrote in a Blog post that Android rivals BlackBerry RIM and Apple iOS are in a "statistical dead head" for second place among recent buyers. The sales period includes the first full month of iPhone 4 availability.
However BlackBerry still holds pole position of installed base with 31 per cent of the market although Nielsen said that its lead over Apple is declining. 28 per cent of smartphones are iPhones compared to 19 per cent of rapidly catching up Android devices.
What interesting by looking at the full graph is that the iPhone and BlackBerry show inverse trends of one another indicating that the two platforms are in tight competition.
Android appears to be talking market share from both equally although in the first three months of the year Android sales appeared to bite into the iPhone market the most.
It’s also perhaps surprising that with a full month of iPhone 4 sales data, Apple was the only smartphone OS to experience a month on month drop in share, possibly due to supply constraint. Android appeared to capitalise on this much more than RIM.
If the trend of the last Apple installed base could overtake RIM in January and Android could become the number one platform before the middle of 2011.
Source: Niesel Blog
