Smartphones continue to grow in popularity. According to Nielsen’s May survey of mobile consumers in the U.S., 38 percent now own smartphones.
And 55 percent of those who purchased a new handset in the past three months reported buying a smartphone instead of a feature phone, up from 34 percent just a year ago.
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38 percent of smartphone consumers acquired an Android device in the last 3 months. However, growth has abandoned Android as it’s numbers are flat in 2011.
It is Apple’s iPhone that has driven smartphone growth in the U.S. this year.
Source: The Nielsen Company
MacDailyNews Take: As our own SteveJack explained two and a half years ago on December 23, 2009:
Google Android offers the same messy, inconsistent Windows PC “experience,” but without any cost savings, real or perceived… I’d call any Android device the “Poor Man’s iPhone,” but you have to spend just as much, if not more, to partake in an increasingly fragmented and inferior platform. There’s no real reason to choose Android, people settle for Android. “I’d have bought an iPhone if Verizon offered them.” Just look what’s happening in any country where iPhone is offered on multiple carriers. It’s a bloodbath.
Apple offers consistency to developers of both software and hardware. Just look at the vibrant third-party accessories market for iPhone vs. the Zune-like handful of oddball items for Android. If you make a case or a vehicle mount, does it pay to make 44 different Android accessories whose total addressable audience numbers under 1 million each, or to make one or two for what’s [now over 200] million iPhone/iPod touch devices? As Apple’s iPhone expands onto more and more carriers, Android’s only real selling point (“I’m stuck on Verizon or some other carrier that doesn’t offer the iPhone”) evaporates.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Brawndo Drinker” for the heads up.]
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Analyst: Android to continue to lose smartphone share – June 20, 2011
Multiple Android tablet peddlers give up, focus on 4- to 5 -inch smartphones – June 17, 2011
Analyst: Apple iPhone 4 still bestseller ‘by far’ at AT&T and Verizon; still outsells Android in U.S. – June 13, 2011
Nielsen finds decline in Android’s U.S. smartphone share – May 31, 2011
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