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Feb. 10, 2010

According to a new study from comScore, Apple's new iPhone 3G S smartphone managed to grab a bit of the Blackberry market share in the fourth quarter of last year.

The Blackberry's market share dropped a full percentage point to 41.6 percent in the U.S., while Apple gained slightly over 1.1 percentage points of the market, bringing its total market share to 25.3 percent.

Smartphones based on Microsoft's Windows Mobile platform actually lost one percentage point and handsets based of Palm's Web-OS also lost 2.2 points of market share.

ComScore also released data about the top 5 handset vendors for the U.S. market. Motorola was in the top spot but actually lost 1.4 percentage points of its market share, bringing its sales to 23.5 percent of the U.S. market.

Then, South Korean handset makers LG and Samsung came in second and third, respectively, with 21.9 percent and 21.2 percent of the U.S. market.

Nokia's share of the U.S. market actually slipped a bit to about 9.2 percent while RIM gained just over half a percentage point to bring its market share to about 7 percent.

For its part, Google's Android operating system rose 2.7 percentage points, more than doubling its fourth-quarter U.S. market share, to 5.2 percent from 2.5 percent in the third quarter.

ComScore also reported that about 234 million people aged 13 and older used mobile devices in the United States during December of last year.

About 63.1 percent used their wireless handsets and smartphones to send text messages, while about 27.4 percent used mobile browsers and 17.9 percent downloaded all kinds of mobile apps.

Net Neutrality
Last December, market research company Fitch estimated that prepaid net additions will increase by nearly 9 million in 2010 compared to approximately 5 million for postpaid. The firm largely dismissed the threat of possible Net neutrality legislation to the wireless industry in its industry outlook for next year. Last August, wireless carriers and the CTIA (Cellular Telephone Industries Association) had expressed some concern that net neutrality laws could have a major impact on the performance and financial sustainability of data services and the mobile phone industry.

Fitch Ratings also predicted that the wireless industry would continue to see increased competition and the current weak economy, with subscriber growth slowing to about four percent next year, compared to less than 5.2 percent for this year.

"Overall, while there are a large number of regulatory issues that still need to be addressed in the telecommunications and cable industry, led by universal service funding (USF) and intercarrier compensation, these current issues will be more complicated and take a longer time to resolve," said Fitch Ratings' report.

"Instead, it appears that next year the FCC will focus on their involvement in the broadband development allocation of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and Net neutrality. Neither of these issues is likely to have any material impact on financials or prospects for the industry for next year."

The overall growth of mobile prepaid services cut into postpaid net adds, which remained relatively flat in 2009 despite the proliferation of 3G services.

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Source: comScore.