Apple is the top smartphone manufacturer followed by Samsung and LG, which saw its smartphones selling well in the U.S. during the last few months.
These are among the findings of comScore for the October 2013 - January 2104 period and the U.S. market.
The research firm said that 159.8 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones (66.8 percent mobile market penetration) during the three months ending in January, up 7 percent since October. Apple ranked as the top OEM with 41.6 percent of U.S. smartphone subscribers (up 1 percentage point from October). Samsung ranked second with 26.7 percent market share (up 1.3 percentage points), followed by LG with 6.9 percent (up 0.3 percentage points), Motorola with 6.4 percent and HTC with 5.4 percent.
Android ranked as the top smartphone platform in January with 51.7 percent market share, followed by Apple with 41.6 percent (up 1 percentage point), BlackBerry with 3.1 percent, Microsoft with 3.2 percent and Symbian with 0.2 percent.
Microsoft has struggled to convince U.S. consumers to trust its Windows Phone platform. Nokia, the leading supplier of Windows Phones and a company Microsoft is set to acquire for $7.17 billion, recently unveiled the Nokia X, a low-cost smartphone that uses a Windows Phone-like user interface on top of an Android code base.
ComScore also reported that Google Sites ranked as the top web property on smartphones, reaching 89.4 percent of the mobile media audience (mobile browsing and app usage), followed by Facebook (86.6 percent), Yahoo Sites (86.2 percent) and Amazon Sites (69 percent). Facebook ranked as the top smartphone app, reaching 77.6 percent of the app audience, followed by Google Play (52.4 percent), YouTube (49.7 percent) and Google Search (48.9 percent).
