The Apple iPhone has taken over as the smartphone in highest demand in the U.S. According to research firm Kantar Worldpanel Comtech, the latest iPhone model helped Apple beat all phones using Google’s Android platform in the U.S. smartphone market in Q4 2011, according to data presented Wednesday. It states “Apple’s share of the U.S. market doubled from a year ago to 44.9 percent in the October to December period, just beating Google’s Android smartphones, which slipped to 44.8 percent from 50 percent”.
In addition, Kantar believes Apple gained strong momentum and it looks to overtake Android smartphones as the most popular among consumers moving forward. This is demonstrated by Apple phones outselling Android manufacturers such as Sony Ericsson, HTC and Motorola. According to global consumer insight director Dominic Sunnebo:
“Apple has continued its strong sales run in the U.S., UK and Australia over the Christmas period. Overall, Apple sales are now growing at a faster rate than Android across the nine countries we cover”.
Naturally, Kantar’s recent findings don’t come without question. We saw as recently as last week that established research and measurement firm Nielsen highlighted Android not only having the most market share, but it also holding a whopping 16 percent advantage over Apple phones in Q4 2011. It’ll be interesting to see how Kantar came up with its findings and what its methodologies were used for its research.
Kantar also includes some minor information for some of the less popular devices in its report as well. Kantar mentions how the Windows Phone share in all of the nine key markets it measured remained at less than 2 percent, despite the high-profile launch of the Lumia range from Nokia. Sunnebo adds “The Nokia Lumia 800 still needs to be joined by a number of other competitive Windows Phone handsets before we are likely to see the OS (operating system) providing any real challenge to the likes of Apple, Android and BlackBerry”. Guess the consensus among research firms is not many people are interested in Windows Phones just yet.
I’m sure you all may have a lot of questions or comments about Kantar’s findings, I know I do. Be sure to hit the Comments section, sound off and give your 2 cents.
[via Reuters]