Android Gained Share, Before iPhone 4 Arrived

Android smartphones gained US market share in the last quarter, while Apple, Microsoft, RIM Blackberry, and Palm all lost slightly. This quarter’s figures will be different, following the release of the iPhone 4 and several Android phones.

Google Android was the only smartphone operating system to see its US subscriber percentage increase in the three-month period between February and May 2010, according research firm comScore. Microsoft, RIM Apple and Palm all lost share, but not precipitously.

Blackberry still leads in the US

Although RIM’s BlackBerry franchise continued to hold the overall lead in US subscribers, with 41.7 percent of the market, it faced a slight 0.4 percent decline. Apple came in second place with 24.4 percent of the market, a drop over the three-month period of 1 point. In third was Microsoft, which slid 1.9 percent to a 13.2-percent share. Meanwhile, Palm — recently acquired by Hewlett-Packard — dipped from 5.4 percent to 4.8 percent.

During the period, however, Google’s Android increased its share from 9 percent to 13 percent.

The news was rosier for Google’s competitors than those numbers suggest, according to comScore. “Despite losing share to Google Android, most smartphone platforms continue to gain subscribers as the smartphone market overall continues to grow,” the firm wrote in an 8 July press release accompanying the results, adding that 49.1 million people in the US currently own smartphones.

Those numbers will likely change over the course of the summer, given the recent introduction of Apple’s iPhone 4 and several robust Google Android smartphones.

During the three days following its 24  June launch, the iPhone 4 managed to sell 1.7 million units. “This is the most successful product launch in Apple’s history,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs wrote in a June 28 statement. “Even so, we apologise to those customers who were turned away because we did not have enough supply.”

However, Apple soon found itself playing defense, after some users reported that touching the device’s exterior antenna rim reduced their reception to zero – and some are suing the company. Apple responded first with a statement that suggested users experiencing the issue should switch how they hold the smartphone, or else keep the device in a case; as the controversy continued to gain momentum, though, Apple then released another statement on 2 July  stating that “the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong.”

The company then promised to push through a software update that would fix the issue. In the meantime, its Android-based rivals wasted no time posting ads that mocked Apple’s troubles. Verizon ran a full-page ad in The New York Times, for example, suggesting that the Motorola Droid X could be held “any way you like and use it just about anywhere.”

Strong Android sales have boosted the quarterly results of smartphone manufacturers such as HTC, which posted profits of $268 million (£177m) for the second quarter of 2010. The hope on the part of these companies is that new devices such as the HTC Evo 4G, Samsung Galaxy S, and Motorola Droid X will all gain more adopters—and if that happens, expect the comScore numbers to reflect that action next quarter.