In the mobile world, the big keep getting bigger, while the formerly big keep getting smaller. ComScore's report on the state of July's U.S. mobile market doesn't show anything startling; Android and Apple sit atop the smartphone heap with 52.2 percent and 33.4 percent of the overall pie, respectively -- both slight gains since April -- while Symbian and BlackBerry continue their rapid fade into obsolescence.
RIM has dipped under a 10 percent share of the market, to 9.5 percent, on the back of a subscriber loss that was larger than either Android or Apple's net subscriber gains. Nokia's Symbian OS, another former top performer, stares extinction in the face and is now found one less than 1 percent of American smartphones.
That's understandable, of course, since Nokia has jumped on the Windows Phone bandwagon. In fact, the company announced its very first Windows Phone 8 handset this morning, the Lumia 920. But did Nokia get in during the early stages of a Windows Phone uprising or simply exchange one questionable platform for another? It remains to be seen, but one thing's for certain: according to comScore, Windows Phones only account for 3.6 percent of the smartphone market. Put another way, that's only a third of the market share of the oft-maligned RIM.
Drilling down even further, Samsung and Apple hold commanding portions of the market, at 25.6 percent and 16.3 percent respectively. Somewhat surprisingly, LG is slightly ahead of Apple with an 18.4 percent share -- though that's almost guaranteed to change when the iPhone 5 hits the streets later on this month.
ComScore's study surveyed 30,000 smartphone users in the U.S.
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